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.

Copyright Credit: Robert Creeley, “A Wicker Basket” from Selected Poems of Robert Creeley. Copyright © 1991 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of the University of California Press, www.ucpress.edu.

Source: Selected Poems (University of California Press, 1991)