Photo of the Week: "Saturday Night"

Poem of the Week:  The Ones Without Lovers by Bruce Hunter

whose novel In the Bear's House will be published

by Oolichan Books of Vancouver Island in spring 2009. 

The Ones Without Lovers

Saturday night in the Mars Diner

Facing the street, eating her toasted sandwich,

Her pie, reading her book.

The ones with lovers laugh without regard,

For those who are alone, but not lonely, so they say

Soft truths the solitary heart speaks, if at all.

Above the street, some play Scrabble on boards

Or screens glowing across the earth.

While others who are alone but not lonely

Read books like this one

About reading about reading about themselves

And don’t recognize each other on the street

Avert their eyes in panic, they know, they know.

From the houses, too loud cries of birds,

And Hitchcock’s droll droning,

Oldies played over and over like a malady.

The alone but not lonely

Order from the phonebook or the web

Someone like pizza, or Chinoise, they say in Mon’real,

And pace the parquet, their feet kissing the floor

In expectation of exultation.

And their hands thrum briefly

Like Hitchcock’s bloody Birds,

Wings of madness alight

As all the lovers they’ve known, lost and imagined

Brush their eyelids with singed lips.

And the ones without lovers with children

Know they must let them go someday.

But for now, thank themselves for their wisdom

As they wait for the door to close one last time.

Always it will be too soon.

The alone and the lonely are not dancing tonight

But waving across the sky at each other.

Above the laughter, the frenzy of perfumed wrists

While the solitary diner reads the impossible poetry of Neruda

Carnivorous for a bite of ear, neck, or lip.

And the Birds cacophonous

With that beat the heart has

in the dream it dares not make.