-Sparks-

Drew Sparks drinks poems

like the Jack-

Daniels she downs at the bar

at "Mr. Flood's Party" on West Liberty.

She smokes poems like unfiltered cigarettes

employing the same facial expressions.

The poems aren’t mine;

they belong to e.e. Cummings.

Drew Sparks was born

in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I was two at the time, living with family

in Fall River, some 60 miles to the south.

Cambridge is where e.e.’s father had a house

and once taught a few sleepy subjects at Harvard University

and I mention these things considering life's six degrees of separation.

But as young adults with different arrivals to the wild midwest,
me, with my drawings in tow which were better than my poems,

even though my drawings weren’t very good, ––and her,

with her weathered good looks, and passion for e.e.–– so,

I was fortunate that she considered me an object of interest.

Could be because I had a few bucks in my pockets, and

I’d buy her drinks when we crossed over to the "Del Rio"

during those wee hours of night when both of us had a free hand.

Sometimes we’d stumble

over to the "Flame" bar on West Washington

where slender young men kissed one another on purpose,

with open mouths over watered-

down highballs and chilled Chablis,

slow-dancing cheek-to-cheek

across the sticky linoleum which made

the rubber soles of their tennis-shoes snap.

It’s easy-going this morning in Fall River

with decades in time and many miles travelled between us

when Drew Sparks read from page 63, fitting it justly

into the blonde-

headed incandescence of the sweltering Flame:

“Jimmie’s got a goil

                                 goil

                                        goil,

                                                Jimmie

‘s got a goil and

she coitnly can shimmie...”

 Ann Arbor, 1969

Fall River, 2010