Serving House: A Journal of Literary Arts
SHJ
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Poem
SHJ Issue 16
Spring 2017

Conversation

by Patrick Theron Erickson

So little space
to misplace anything
or anyone
and still conserve the conversation

Such dialog
is a gift misplaced

Yet there’s a kind of vanity
in misplaced gifts

or a gravitational pull
a displacement of sorts

Vanity or gravity

this is not
what I was getting at

I wanted to share 
mountains with you

plains
the great land
in between

postcards, Kodachrome

I was the traveler
You were indifferent

a shipping clerk
expediting freight

all the dusty invoices
bills of lading

the great land
in between

I was in Oregon

You Montana.

 

SHJ Issue 16
Spring 2017

Patrick Theron Erickson,

a resident of Garland, Texas, a Tree City, just south of Duck Creek, is a retired parish pastor put out to pasture himself. His work has appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal, Cobalt Review, and Burningword Literary Journal, among other publications, and more recently in Right Hand Pointing, Tipton Poetry Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Danse Macabre.


“...we have been born here to witness and celebrate. We wonder at our purpose for living. Our purpose
is to perceive the fantastic. Why have a universe if there is no audience?” — Ray Bradbury