hello, I am your neighbor in this hall seven chairs over to the right
and three rows back, near the woman in the green sweater
who just mussed her hair, which is clipped with a faux-seashell clip
arranged with legs wide and feet touching in a permanent foggy breaststroke kick
but she is not thinking about swimming, I am sure,
but instead the way she curls her front loop of bangs clockwise,
using only two fingers of her left hand,
tells me of her trauma as a child
that she is reliving as the poet up front drones on
recollecting a joyous communion with sycamore trees
and then she, the woman in the green sweater,
tilts her head over to the right as though she is going to say something
to the man in a blue baseball cap sitting next to her
who has a ponytail held in place halfway up his neck with a simple
mother-of-pearl horizontal bar, his hair below reaching down
in alignment with the vertical stripes of his shirt in the area
between his thin pointy shoulder blades
but the woman in the green sweater says nothing
to the man in the blue baseball cap,
instead he is a domino tilting his head,
I assume unconsciously, in mimic of her
and I base this on the fact of his head being otherwise pointed attentively at the poet
who is now imagining the cave of a hermit in the woods
and I’ll bet blue cap is thinking Wordsworth is being ripped off
which gets us back to green sweater who had her cat snatched by a coyote
in front of her eyes,
in her backyard
when she was ten—so she is thinking of screaming
when the poet goes on about bounding over mountains
and what he felt in the blood
and then everyone pushes their heads back straight without screams,
the poet mentions the still, sad music of humanity,
and I send you, you seven left and three forward in the hall,
I send you this thought—
that I wish you would not wear a hat in the hall,
it blocks the view and then my mind wanders endlessly.