Thomas Locicero’s most recent poem to appear here was “Mysterious Child” (August 2018).

Smiling in the Undertow
By Thomas Locicero

The gulls are curious about the man
who smiles in the undertow.

His hobbies and interests, his thoughts
and activities were once many,

but then his time was spent in an
uncharacteristic focus on an image

he had created in the form of a woman
and she was somewhere smiling

at the image she had made of him.
How they made gods of one another

to convince themselves and the world
that they had found their “one”!

A young man, on lover infinity,
I had lost my soul, so what is a heart?

I once spent thirty minutes in a crowded
aisle to happily spend my money on a card

with someone else’s poem in it because
the look on her face, I believed, would be

worth every penny. An older gentleman
entered the aisle, latched his eyes onto mine,

and said, “Watch this!” He snatched the first
card he saw and, as he walked away, he said,

“Married forty-six years.” Either he knew
his wife so well or he no longer loved her

with the love which I loved my one. Now I
am an old man smiling in an undertow.

I smile because I am thinking about the woman
who has given me more joy than any other.

I am in the undertow because my soul is being
dragged and dredged by the dregs—the least valuable

part of—my heart. I still pretend it is love, though I
no longer smile for the one but rather for another.