Vignette

It is late October in San Francisco

But the temperature is still seventy-three degrees.

And that’s at seven-thirty

In the evening.

I walk back from dinner, passing a dog

With flashing collar, and I think

It wouldn’t look out of place at a club

Sometime in the 1990's.

I didn’t ask the owner

If it’s a he or a she or if there’s a

Preferred doggie pronoun movement

I don’t know about

Because this is San Francisco, after all.

Closer to the hotel now,

I realize this is my second poem

Written about the city

In as many weeks

And that sense of forcing a routine amidst

Displacement and disorientation

Is the source of all creative.

Inside the marble lobby,

Another woman with another dog

Enters the elevator before me.

Her dog is friendly,

She announces,

And her dog is a she.

A she named Lola,

Which makes me think

Of the Lola in the Kinks song

Who isn’t a she at all.

I pat Lola’s head appreciatively,

And wait for them to leave,

The same way I wait for the maids

To leave

After cleaning my room.

Until I realized one day

There’s no written rule stating you have to have

Your room cleaned every day

Especially when there’s only one of you

And you aren’t messy.

And so that’s it, really.

We tend to believe our lives are stories.

But they’re really a series of vignettes,

Some interesting, some harrowing,

And some just plain old boring.

But tonight, it’s a vignette worth recording.

And now I feel like

William Carlos Williams felt

When he opened that refrigerator

And gorged himself

On sweet plums, thinking:

Hey, I should write this fucker down.