SEATTLE

photo: sharon auberle

SEATTLE

by Donna Hilbert

“ . . . but Wilson had no car.  He felt almost intolerably lonely.”

                                    Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

So homesick, I engaged wrong numbers

in conversation

for the sound of another

human voice

that year in Seattle when it rained three hundred days.

Not hard as it would at home

and then be done for months,

but just a light piss,

air always damp

like the baby’s diaper.

I watched pink fingers of mold

double every day

in the corner of the window

looking out on evergreens and endless grass.

I longed for LA--

palm trees and Hybrid Bermuda,

trees that let in light and grass with grace

enough to die back

yellow in the winter.

I hated the rain the natives praised

“rain makes everything green,” they’d say,

deranged as they were on chlorophyll and caffeine.

I was green too at nineteen,

with a shiny new husband, one baby,

belly ripening with the next.

My husband studied engineering at the U.

And I studied too--his books from World Lit—

Dostoevsky, Kafka, Camus.

My favorite was Graham Greene

The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter—

burnt-out-cases

adrift in the existential sea.

And I thought then that I

was more displaced

than any whiskey priest or disaffected spy

which I declared to any wrong number

who would take the time

to listen.

~ first published in Fire