Ten Years Ago

Poetry

And a lot of miles back and forth

Our lives sometimes overlapped
like two sheets of scrap paper
like your hand over mine
at the movies or in the car

on the way to or from
the theater where we loved
Chris Hemsworth as Thor.
Your blue house is still

less than ten miles south
and just west of mine
and I learned from Wikipedia
we have 60,000 miles

of blood vessels to reach
to and from each of our hearts.

I wrote this by starting with a very rough draft for a poem that I never finished, found in a journal entry in a spiral notebook dated January of 2010.

My process: I took what I wrote back then and edited out the parts where I was feeling sorry for myself. I added Thor and other details like the house to be more specific. I’d had the idea about the blood vessels all those years ago but couldn’t make the poem work then.

The journal entry comes from more than ten years ago, but in choosing a title, I rounded down as “ten” sounded good to me. Plus, Thor was released in 2011. So the poem had its start in 2010 but caught up with me in 2022 when I had lots of other memories to draw upon.

I like to think that poems live in a timeless place and are the products of imagination, not just reality. But I like to think a lot of things. Thank you for reading my work; I appreciate it.

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