Samuel Dickerson

A Bowl of Hot Soup in Dallas, TX

The things you can’t remember tell
the things you can’t forget that history puts a saint
in every dream
—Tom Waits

Whether it’s chicken tortilla or crawfish
bisque doesn’t matter, it’s mid-day
and you’re in the sun. It’s eighty-five

degrees and hotter
from the blacktop
and the city bleed,

this island of urban
heat. That said, your face isn’t
red and you don’t see

a problem. You clean
the drips from your chin. The orange
thickens on the napkin

which is brighter at noon, how white
is every color until you added this one
but maybe I misunderstand

prisms. I do understand
what it means to remove—to rid
is to add to something else,

what we consider neat
is just loss. We can only hide
our mess by making another. Maybe this is

why, in the skin-melt July of nineteen-sixty-nine
people learned to fear
Greer Island, why we both cry
on clear nights. What muddled his white

thicket, whether he wandered over
for the day or remained,
got a job and shaved

into a suit. If what scares us most
is not a stain
but a recluse. To never be seen

                        again, or be the glare
in the thread, or the leather, woven

into remembrance. It matters
what wipes you away. Traces
of capsaicin tremble

your mouth, the cool
glass leaks its combat, this crepuscular
moment in the bright lights of Theatre
Row, in sixty-one. You dab the sweat

with black linen         
in the first and only
term, a tempestuous evening
with the president that ends

in a towel, in a hotel,
whether you’re Marilyn Monroe
or someone else

we never knew enough
to remember. What we lose
and can’t mop up—

a clear day like this one,
in the plaza, the cerulean
birthplace of this city, where

the bowl has fallen to wind
or gravity, the precise force
of an index finger

and now, you soak up the spill,
you and the rest of us
reel and have been reeling

for years, for us, because no
cloth can save.

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Samuel Dickerson is a Best of the Net Award Nominee and has poems published or forthcoming in swamp pink and Harpur Palate. He is currently in the MFA Program at the University of Northern Michigan and he served as poetry editor for The Scarab.