I’m reading Jim Harrison in a motel
my alcoholic friends call El Porcho,
my non-alcoholic friends don’t bother
to stop by. This is genuine Cuban tile,
the minty green swirled with tan and white,
one of them says, and I look as if gin and tonic
is reassessing the damage the insides of a glass
can do. Outside the sky—blue—
and beyond that the emptiness of everything,
every taste we’ve ever swallowed
stretches out and settles, asks for just one
more. Last night, I find, I challenged someone
to a game of nine-ball on Duval, said I’d even
play left-handed, scrambled from southern
discomforts repeating and these disturbed
eyebrow raises or blank bar stares
every time I added or removed the letter R.
The only taker was miffed, took an extra-long
drag of some domestic bottle tilted, back-handed
with much more style than he showed a pool cue,
said something about cheats and liars and thieves
and how I may qualify for two out of three,
at least. Of course there was a line, not just the kind
you need on hand, the kind that waits, pretends
that listening to regurgitated steel drum is satisfying,
shifts from glance to glance to shot and wonders
at the exits. I did this too, of course, and all that
sunshine in the afternoon had me tired
of fighting. I only do two things left-handed, I said,
watching for the words to make their way from
me, and one of them is play pool. In my dreams
I hit another shot but instead in this time circling at
the bottom I watch smoke rise, and screw
the sunburn on my forehead up, pray or wish,
or want—the other is shoot a gun I say, and notice
in the morning how I made it home with all my teeth,
but without the ends of stories. Check each one
with swollen tongue , taste the ashy dust from
all those other men and their typewritten love songs
to missing fish, those deep evening memories
obscured by empty threats. I find a wrinkled shirt
discarded there over a single, unnecessary chair,
catch the sky still so blue and nasty through just-cracked
window slats, each of us as thirsty as the sunrise.