Guessing (a poem)

I. 

I guess I was working on the farm 
a month or so, I was in medias res 
to be literary about it, and Sara 
was maybe the fourth or fifth 
person to arrive. 

Younger by three or four years 
(I'd turn 26 that May) 
a cute, friendly creature 
ripe as fresh fruit 
however your eye moved on her. 

Neysa & Travis, the would-be career farmers 
who'd showed up early in the roster 
and were consistently more organized 
than any of us, always treated her 
with some deference -- Neysa, I guess, 
because their personalities ran a little hot & cold 
to each other; Travis because he didn't 
want Neysa, his fiancee, to suppose he was 
flirting. 

Well, let's Super-Size this blossoming burden 
and include one more to encourage our 
petulant narrator's carnal appetite: 
Esther: Esther: who I thought might 
be flirting with me under the kitchen 
table, sometimes, who me and Sara (and 
eventually Tim) (for a minute) who'd take 
weekend trips to the Library in Brewster 
to get books and videos and make 
half-hearted attempts to get to know each other.... 

And in hardly six months it'd all get washed out with the rain. 

II. 

Mainly, because of our ages: 20-somethings 
at the turn of the millenium weren't 
raised to have strong interpersonal-skills. 
We were, to be plainly socially critical on the matter, 
left (or ignored) to the devices and bodysprays and 
arrogant chatter of reality-television programming 
and 
whatever misfit wisdom we'd acquired by fate & accident & 
happenstance. 

Speaking for myself, at any rate. 

I think Tim went back to public school in the city once 
his time was up and he'd met his requirement. 

Esther sometime after (and after she'd softly 
told me she liked girls when I asked her out) 
whom I'd still pour a cup of coffee for 
if she inquired. 

I thought I heard somewhere in the last ten years (it's 
now 2024) that T & N split up but regardless 
it's not getting any free-rent in my head. 

And it might've been farewell and mahalo 
except 
there's a third part.  

III. 

Someone on a t.v. show (I'm a fan of) said 
how nudes - meaning photos - are the new 
currency of trust. 
Sometimes you also think of a particular 
Primus song (Glass....) 

It's all a touch disorienting 
if not downright gaslighting 
when there are so many cooks 
stacking incoherent points of 
view. 

And I wonder, is that 
my first crush 
with a surfer for Jesus 
and S making home movies? 
What is this photograph 
my mother has 
of one of my cousins 
and a darkhaired girl 
I haven't seen in 
over ten years? 

Finis. 

****