Elegy for the Travel Agents
       

It might be easier to look at photographs of a lake
than to actually plan, prepare and take a vacation,
but sometimes you have to find a tablet somewhere
and start a list. Look at the sun. It's not a telephone
that keeps ringing. One word written with conviction,
such as must, is like taking a step on a wide, frozen
lake when waves are singing along the shoreline.
Sometimes the waves are inside you. Your chest
for instance, each nipple a wolf nose pushing out
towards what you might do next. You need a vacation.
You know you do. And the need's so acute it's
getting in the way of making it happen. Welcome to
the way most people walk down the sidewalk each day.
Welcome to those above ground pools you buy
for a couple hundred bucks then fill with hose water
and sit in in your backyard as the sides slough
slowly out of shape and dark hawks stitch the surface
with moving shadows. You look for a place
to set your drink protected with its own umbrella
and there is no place. Your drink looks up at you—
stares up at you, really. Your drink two weeks
in the Bahamas. You tilt the umbrella to cover
the ice cubes, to keep them alive a little longer.

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Copyright © 2017 Christopher Citro All rights reserved
from Southern Indiana Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission