Their Eyes

 

 

There is a drugstore

What we’d call it

Wait, a soda fountain

No, an ice cream parlor

Of the old kind

In my town,

I mean the old kind

Made of wood inside

The kind that is

Thick paneling

Holding up the walls

And whatever a

Soda fountain really

Inside, what controls

Behind the counter,

Is there

And all the wired,

Cushioned chairs

That keep us in our place

Just long enough

It even has the gilded

Name of Eckels,

Which for some reason

Makes me think

Of spectacles

Not on a sign such as

The billboard in Gatsby

That also makes me think

Of the work by

Zora Neale Hurston

 

Old-fashioned eyeglasses

Metal, round

The kind that perch

Upon the nose

Through which we

See a shaded world

No longer extant

Save in restorations

Such as Eckel’s

 

A walk into time

(with fresh ingredients)

Such as in the story

When the man

(it was a man)

Walks down the stairs

Inside a city station,

Finds another

Set of tracks that takes

Him back in time through

Less than

A hundred years or so

To live in quiet time

Stretching easily for

Needs something like an

Old-coin collection

 

In the past,

We read that story, too

 

 

nota bene

There is a mystery

I hadn’t read the novel in some years

Though as an English teacher

I should know it

Eckel can be found in Eckleburg,

Somehow

Though I wasn’t thinking that

On passing by

The store in town

Or until I looked it up, just now

Mystery of memory

I don’t know how to read it with

So many blank pages

In between

 

 

C L Couch

 

 

 

(“The Third Level” by Jack Finney, 1950)

 

Photo by victor vote on Unsplash