Twenty Minutes

It's not 1948, Pepsi in paper cups, foot-long hot dogs, window trays at fast- food drive ins, and outdoor movies, getting each other going in the back seat of a Dodge. It's the front seat of your Honda after beers in the parking lot of a midtown bookstore where the local public access TV crew tries to prove poetry alive and well in this part of the Deep South, miles from Flannery's wise blood, Faulkner's small town square, the spirits, demons and dulcimers of that pied piper, James Dickey, who might have approved of us, might have said Yes! Go for it! and for twenty ecstatic minutes, we did. Now, in the charged air of chance meetings, you ask, "Shall we ever?" and I fall back into twenty minutes of paradise--their immortal possibilities.