Hard Kisses

On a whim a couple years ago, I took a creative writing course at Solano Community College. The school was right next door to my subdivision. I could practically walk there. My youngest son was still in the womb, due any time soon, so this was my last chance at doing something with my relative free time. I didn't expect much. Boy was I surprised.

In many ways I will always be that small-town boy with a narrow mind. Prejudices creep in, guiding me in small ways. For instance, I used to despise the whole profession of psychology, and regarded anyone who saw a "shrink" as weak. Eventually, personal experience forced me to change my mind. The same prejudice kept me from reading a single line of poetry without dismissing it with a scoff. Dr. Laurie Duesing, my esteemed creative writing professor, blew those doors off the hinges.

Her class put me on the track I'm on today. If she had been anyone different, someone negatively critical for instance, I might not have continued.

Dr D, as her students affectionately call her, is an accomplished poet. She wrote a collection of poems that can be purchased at Amazon called Hard Kisses. I always return to the same piece, again and again. The poem is called Precision, which for me has many meanings. The obvious I will leave for your interpretation. For me, this poem is arrow sharp in delivering pain to my heart, as if for a moment I am behind her eyes feeling the loss of someone who lived fast and hard.

Precision
by Laurie Duesing

The day you flew in perfect arc
from your motorcycle was the same day
I broke the perfect formation of your women
at the railing, leaving behind
your grandmother and mother, to run
and jump the fence. The stop watch hanging
from my neck, suspended between gravity
and momentum, swung its perfect pendulum.
All our motion was brought to conclusion
by your broken body at rest
on the ground. Your breath never rose
to the oxygen placed on your face
and your heart never rallied
to the arms pressing your chest.
You wore the perfect clothes:
the ashy grey of death.

At the hospital they said your failure to survive
was complete. Though I never saw
the neck you perfectly broke or your body
cleanly draped by a sheet, I did see
your dead face bruising up at me
and for lack of something to touch,
I touched the stop watch
which had not died.
If any nurse or doctor had asked,
I could have told, exactly,
to the hundreths of seconds, how long
it had been since I'd seen you alive.