Pull


	ERIC GREEN
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PULL

Sand lifts from an empty street
On a chill January night,
Under a big moon,
A small street light,
Before a closed and unlit bar--
And yet another heart is broken.
The body to a halt,
The eyes over cold neon
And inverted chairs, as
Another cloud of sand rises
As a dirty yellow-gray shroud
And moves like negation up the macadam.

Who will write poems for the drunkards,
The despairing, the lonely, the diseased?
Did not Van Gogh's contemporaries know he was a genius?
Was he just too difficult or just too good,
That they left him to his absinthe and whores.
Or the rich with their smiles (always good teeth)
And their polished manners and empty words,
Their endless bloodletting of the poor,
Should we forgive them for they know what they do?

An Irish fellow from County Cork
Taught me how to drink bottled beer.
Thin, reedy, nervous, claiming a chest--
Felt he needed something stout.
He drank a bottle of ale in
Three joyous pulls, the bubbles
Dancing madly under brown glass as:
His face turned up, eye lashes hooded,
The thick bottle end held up to God.

Watching this a few times I realized that
I had always wanted to drink beer that way,
But I had sipped, wanted it to last.
And so we endure our lives
With our little savored sips
Or our long willing pulls.