Portside

Waiting for the End

By Peter Neil Carroll

In Havana, fifty years after the missiles,
memory blends into history as Orlando
bone-thin in a T-shirt, guides me through
a maze of underground bunkers, raw-edged,
chilly, past the ammunition box on which
his father stood expecting an invasion.

Watch your head, he warns, tapping my scalp,
and we duck under antique air vents, periscopes,  
machine gun nests, stumble on broken rock
to an outpost overlooking the dark-blue waves.
Air bright, salty, cloudless, eyes drawn by reflex
toward invisible Florida, ninety miles away.

That numb October Friday, my birthday, I waited
for the world to end. and when Madame LaMonte
crossed the threshold, noticing a youth named
Paul holding a guitar, and announced no literature
today. She asked him to cheer us with a song.
Time slowed, Simon sans Garfunkel sang to us.

Orlando never heard that music but thinking maybe
I mean the Beatles, assures me he’s simpatico, clasps
my hand. Amigo, he says, pointing to the windy straits 
still keeping us apart, we’re people not governments.

Peter Neil Carroll’s fourth collection of poetry, The Truth Lies on Earth: A Year by Dark, by Bright (Turning Point Press) was published in February 2017. He lives in northern California with the writer/photographer Jeannette Ferrary.