New York City, August 7, 1974

We were new at this grown-up stuff.
Me reading your beat poets and
you listening to my Gram Parsons
in the faint light of a dripping candle
stuck into a Mateus Rose’ bottle.

Dawn brought this headline:
“Nixon Will Resign!”
And the view of a daring Frenchman
walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers.

We stared out your pocket
Battery Park window as Gram sang about
being a do right all night man if
you want a do right all night woman

We descended into each other
while you recited Brautigan:
“Someday Time will die, and Love will bury it.’

We believed it.
We thought that’s how it would go.
But, no. We had it backward:
Someday Love will die, and Time will bury it.

Greg Clary is a retired college professor who was born and raised in Turkey Creek, West Virginia, and now resides in the northwestern Pennsylvania Wilds.

His photographs have been published in The Sun Magazine, Looking at Appalachia, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, The Watershed Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Change Seven, Dark Horse, Detour Ahead, Bee House Journal, and many other publications

His writing and poems have appeared in The Rye Whiskey Review, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Northern Appalachia Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Waccamaw Journal, The Watershed Journal, Rusty Truck, Ant-Heroin Chic, Sterling Clack Clack, Wingless Dreamer, and North/South Appalachia: Poetry and Art, Vol 1.