A Wicker Basket
Comes the time when it's later and onto your table the headwaiter puts the bill, and very soon after rings out the sound of lively laughter— Picking up change, hands like a walrus, and a face like a barndoor's, and a head without any apparent size, nothing but two eyes— So that's you, man, or me. I make it as I can, I pick up, I go faster than they know— Out the door, the street like a night, any night, and no one in sight, but then, well, there she is, old friend Liz— And she opens the door of her cadillac, I step in back, and we're gone. She turns me on— There are very huge stars, man, in the sky, and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie, with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it, and I eat it— Slowly. And while certainly they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket of these cats not making it, I make it in my wicker basket.
From Selected Poems by Robert Creeley. Copyright © 1991 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Used with permission. Originally published in For Love: Poems 1950-1960 (Scribner, 1962).