By George Bilgere

There’s my friend Miles, reading the paper.
Looking at him, you’d never guess
He’s a world-class ichthyologist.

And there’s Graciella, still attractive,
Letting herself go gray. I remember
All the fuss about her groundbreaking treatise
On neutrinos created back in the early nineties.
She’s reading a book entitled, simply, Neutrinos.

And there, of course, is Marty. He’s always here,
With his flip-flops and his laptop.
His cappuccino and his shorts.
He’s the number one guy,
In this hemisphere, anyway,
In antimatter. What Marty doesn’t know
About antimatter isn’t worth knowing.

He’s talking with Lewis
Who is sweeping the floor.
Lewis knows his back hurts
When it’s going to storm. He knows
We don’t have any pitching this year,
And he’s right about that
And Marty knows he’s right
And there’s no point arguing about it.

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George Bilgere’s most recent book, Haywire, won the May Swenson Poetry Award in 2006. His work has recently appeared in FIELD, Ploughshares, River Styx, and New York Quarterly.

Originally appeared in NOR 5