Two Poems

Last Job

We finished school in May. I headed East.
She moved back home. We talked by phone. She came
to visit once and stayed in a hotel.
But the city wasn’t going to work for her:
too tall, too many steam holes, too much noise.

Months before, we’d robbed a bookstore where
she’d been made manager. She had the keys.
With my blue Buick idling outside,
we helped ourselves to boxes full of books,
walked them right out the front door: poetry,
a book on flying, Kafka’s stories, pulp.
Books were our thing. We loved them, and we felt
they should be ours, God knows why. So we took
what we could while it was ours to take.



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