Love at the Drive-In by Gail Braune Comorat

Love at the Drive-In
by
Gail Braune Comorat

Ben Affleck is in love with Rebecca Hall

and you and I are sitting in our RV

which smells of smoke and hiking boots

and the kettle corn on which we’re snacking.

Today we ferried to a favorite monument:

Boldt Castle on Heart Island, still unfinished,

its turn of the century construction ended

with a telegram. Stop all work. Louise has died.

The couple in this movie is doomed, too.

He robs banks, is hunted by the FBI.

Another scripted fairy tale, one more dream

propped against a flimsy sky.

How often have we told the story of us:

young widow, a blind date, a chance trip north,

our first tour of Louise’s crumbling estate—

is love always guided by happenstance?

I study your profile in the darkness.

Twenty years, and still, we surprise ourselves.

Tonight we’re sharing our first drive-in together

because the wind was too fierce to build a fire.

Gail Braune Comorat is a founding member of the Rehoboth Beach Writers’ Guild, and co-author of Walking the Sunken Boards. She served as editor for Quartet, an online poetry journal by women fifty and over. Gail's work has appeared in Gargoyle, Grist, Mudfish, Philadelphia Stories, and The Widows’ Handbook. She lives in Lewes, Delaware.

Donna Pflueger:
Thank you, Gail. I will look forward to buying that and I thank you for your kind words.
Posted 10/06/2013 05:08 PM

gailcomorat:
Thank you, everyone, for the lovely comments. And to Donna--there's a new poetry anthology coming out early next year called The Widow's Handbook. More than anything I read, poetry helped me most to grieve. My best to you.
Posted 10/06/2013 01:15 PM

Jo:
What a terrific poem, Gail. Such a great love poem.
Posted 10/05/2013 05:02 PM

KevinArnold:
That last line resonates.
Posted 10/05/2013 01:28 PM

Donna Pflueger:
Gail, being recently widowed, your wonderful poem touched me deeply and colored my morning with memories -good memories and I thank you for this gift.
Posted 10/05/2013 10:24 AM

Charly:
A love story that brings me back to the part of the country I knew well as a kid...thanks...
Posted 10/05/2013 08:16 AM

JWalcott:
I don't know about this kind of love, but I do know that the layers in this poem, the way each stanza is a story, the deft rhyme right there in the middle stanza, and the vivid images make me love this poem. Thank you.
Posted 10/05/2013 06:48 AM

LindaCrosfield:
I love this. Love the story within a story of it. Good one.
Posted 10/05/2013 04:06 AM

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