As Observed from a Stationary Picnic Table

Julia asked me why I didn’t come there anymore

to eat my lunch on the picnic table beside the statue

of Albert Einstein, each wild hair on his head

a masterpiece in marble, though clearly I was there

now—or then. Was it, she asked, that I felt lesser

than, in his presence, me eating a tuna salad

sandwich before going back to my job delivering

boxed wine to high-rise shut-ins on my bicycle,

while Al had been captured in stone juggling

the solar system between his hands? No, I said,

I think he would’ve been happy to sit here with me

and share a sandwich and slip a straw into a box

of Californian rosé meant for Eunice Carver

of 94D Park Place, and I think we would have talked

about the violin which I also played when I

was young and the way the Yankees have tanked

again, and I would have gently explained to him

that whistling at the women walking by us

on the street isn’t done anymore. Fair enough,

he might have said, but I am still doing it in my head—

that’s still okay, I hope, imagining a universe in my head

where just one time Marilyn Monroe responds

to my catcall and comes over to run her fingers

through my hair? I said that I hoped so, too,

and told him how sometimes when I was weaving

my bike through traffic I imagined myself chasing

a beam of light while pedaling at the speed of light,

no longer content to stand on the platform or sit

at a picnic table (this to Julia, who said she had a straw,

if that’s what it took) but standing at the front of the train

with my head out the window where the light would strike first.

(first published in Poetry Northwest, 2017)