The Prose Poem


Louis Jenkins

SEPTEMBER

One evening the breeze blowing in the window turns cold and you pull the blankets around you. The leaves of the maples along Wallace Avenue have already turned and whoever it was you loved does not come around anymore. It's all right. Things change with the cycle of the seasons and evolve. A mistake, a wrong turn takes one elsewhere. But perhaps there are principles other than chance and natural selection at work here. Perhaps one changes merely out of boredom with the present condition. Perhaps our children, from a desire to become simply other than what we are, grow feathers, learn to breathe underwater or to see in the dark.