It matters that her eyes were greener
than most of the land
where I grew up. It matters
that she moved toward me,
wanting but not desperate, knowing
of Yeats what I’d forgotten,
immersed in the movement
of the rail car as it moved
through the rocks of County Cork.
The East of my youth forgotten,
the statues and the Wall, she said,
“It’s better here, and blueberries
resist among these rocks.” A gray
station awaited. I could almost see it,
and when we arrived its gray
gave way to bright pink
rhododendron farther out,
where the village began, where
in a dream nights later we made love
after boiling carrots for soup.
Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Adroit Journal. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American literature at Dokuz Eylül University.