Tagus
Two men walk down the steps
above the river. We no longer
recall how it looks some thirty
years later. We sit up on the hill,
eating olives, pimentos, pork,
and peas in tomato sauce, dipping
bread at table like sunset beards
under joints of iron and stone,
as monastery tracery shadows us.
Paul, surprising me, stops along
the wall. He shakes hands. It’s
a brown dog, awed chihuahua,
nearly frightened by a stranger.
I now know what it is to feel you
close to me—like men fishing
the Tagus, casting their quivering
poles, waiting in light. Sundown
fish jump. The men know how
to catch all our hope.
______________
Jan Wiezorek
Review by Jared Pearce
What interests me here is the juxtapositioning of the image groups: the fishers, the dinner, the dog and Paul. The poem, relying on space, pulls these bits into an orbit that the reader, then, navigates and, perhaps by inveighing a little mass, create an orbit.