It's May, warm, Tender green
flares from a canopy
of cottonwoods,

branches dipping
as we drive beneath them,
across the Higgins Street Bridge

for lunch. The restaurant is
an old whorehouse,
the bricks in back

gone patchy gray. It overlooks
the river, and all the fish are women
leapt from windows winters

when the ice was thin.
We sit near the bar but he doesn't
order beer —

just a sandwich and a mug of tea
and he speaks of
Auburn prison,

where he read inmates' poems
That's my hometown, I say,
recalling the fortress

with badass gunners
peering through green glass,
prisoners themselves

in turrets atop high walls.
They closed my school once
when news of an escape

filled the radio waves. Even if a man
could scale a concrete slab
that tall and thick and slip

the gauntlet of frantic guards
firing at his back,
where would he go then?

Creeley says the hotel room
is comfortable and smiles
for the first time.

I hadn't written a poem in months,
he says, but when I walked
into that room,

saw brown grass sway
on the hill's incline, saw sun
flash on the river shallows,

saw the shiver of new-fleshed trees,
it made me want to weep.
I had to sit down

and write.
He's got the poem
on a wrinkled page

and he reads it to me,
sitting there in the café
as the waitress

floats into view and without interrupting
his song, leaves the check.