Rolly Kent
In the Fifties
In traffic a young woman on a rented
bike catches up, overtakes, falls back
as my taxi moves along one of the streets
in the Fifties, her bike passing the cab,
the cab passing the bike until a stretch
when we ride at the same pace, Youth and Age
side by side, Age seeing the glow of sweat
on her upper lip, Youth squinting at
a cab carrying its someone-or-other,
hardly even a person, overwritten
as I must look by reflections of buildings
and the new sky, or, as she glances at
the tinted glass, by the inflection of
her own face, her worker’s coveralls,
the star points of the city in which I am
a small fossil in the strata of other times,
the other Fifties when I saw in Life
magazine this same girl interrupting
the great fields of boyhood not with
rockets or lies about the failed Russian
harvest—instead, Khrushchev showed her off
in a long line of blond girls waving
Soviet flags. I found her face and tore out
the page; now here she is again, pedaling
beside me on Fifty-Third Street where
her golden hair is shining, accidental and
intimate, like the wheat crop that never was.
Rolly Kent has published widely in many magazines, including The Atlantic, The American Review, Comstock Review, Louisville Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Threepenny Review and others. He has published two books of poetry, The Wreck in Post Office Canyon (Maguey Press) and Spirit, Hurry (Confluence Press). After a long detour through prose writing, he returned to poetry in 2016. Carnegie Mellon University Press will bring out the collection that resulted, Phone Ringing in a Dark House, in 2023.
ISSN 2472-338X
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