poem

Sometimes a poem you've read before, like a person you may have briefly met at some crowded party, shows up alone and suddenly the conversation becomes more intimate and, with a little serendipity, a friendship is born. So it was with me and this poem. Peter has graciously allowed me to share it with you:

A Chance Encounter
-Peter Ludwin

Because she had once married a Greek
because I'd traveled to Greece in the '60s
because we were visiting a mutual friend
on the Upper West Side,
we had this conversation.
And though I protested when she sat down
that I had to get some sleep
she insisted on just one small glass of wine.
Which became two and then three
as we agreed that where Kazantzakis was transcendent,
Sartre was empty and Hemingway merely small.
Her hands spoke passion,
as if releasing flocks of doves into her voice,
a soft liquer blend of European Texas
that drew me into that old yearning
for the expatriate life,
for garnet angels
and mandolins raining down

on Russia

and I thought yes,
there's that chorus in the blood,
the one that's attended all our births:
to track the minotaur,
the iron tyranny of THINGS,
to find it and destroy it with the dance,
with epiphanies of water,
swinging up onto its head
like a naked acrobat
as the light pours in from the sea.

© Peter Ludwin

A Chance Encounter is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in 1996 in Lullwater Review, the literary journal of Emory University in Atlanta.

Peter’s new book of poems, A Guest in All Your Houses, is now available from Word Walker Press and, shortly, from Amazon.com.