​POETRY  -  
          With the Theme of Choices 

"As I drove back to the city,
beating my rejected-male retreat,
the lines we'd shared came back to me:
“La belle dame sans merci”"
                           
                                Photo by Weebly.com                                    

Finnish Is Not an
Indo-European Language 
by Steve Surryhne

​​The arguments cooling off, the beer
going warm, the writers' group,
at the Albatross Pub,
as was its custom, broke up,
losing the noise competition
to the dead-enders shouting
as they bet on the dart throwers.
Some, with bleary goodbyes and so longs
dispersed into the Berkeley night,
but I, hanging back, surveyed
the pub for one last literary cliché
and found her, seated alone at the bar,
a noticeable blonde.
 
I mounted the barstool beside her
murmuring “Let us go then, you and I . . .”
which she completed: “like a patient etherized upon a table.”
She was well-read! I knew then
that she might be the one for me tonight.
Was this the plot: I picked this woman up
in a bar, or was I her pickup?
We traded lines, she, smoking
cigarette after cigarette, nervous, vigilant,
like a film noir femme fatale.
 
She came from the Eastern stretches of Sweden,
a Swedish Finn, or a Finnish Swede,
an oppressed minority, citizens,
but treated by the Swedes as second-class.
She spoke of this with great bitterness
as she spat a shred of tobacco
from the tip of her tongue.
 
The albatross began to fold its wings
at two A.M. “Hurry up please, it's time!”
“Would you like to go to my place,
it's not far from here,” this not said
in full Mae West entendre,
but promising, slightly slurred.
“We'll have some real vodka,
Finnish vodka, Kostenkorva.”
We drank to Prufrock, “Kippis!”
and I learned my first word in Finnish.
 
The alcohol had done its best,
if not its worst, and brought us
to this moment. And what
was she after? A sympathetic
ear which I had lent her.
I gazed into her blue arctic eyes
filled with promise, I thought,
but as it turned out, they were not.
We got into some heavy petting,
but when disengaged, she said
“You're not getting me into bed,
you can take the couch.” Ouch!
I can also take no for an answer,
I've taken many such before.
And I'd learned another Finnish word (“ei”).
 
And so in the pre-dawn darkness,
I went, my clothes permeated
with perfume and tobacco scent.
As I drove back to the city,
beating my rejected-male retreat,
the lines we'd shared came back to me:
“La belle dame sans merci”
seemed the most fitting to end this night.
Had it all been a dream or a literary fantasy
in which I wanted to believe? I found
a long blonde strand entwined around my sleeve.

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​​Steve Surryhne was an Associate Lecturer in English Literature at SFSU from 1993-2012. He is currently semi-retired and has recently returned to writing poetry. A native of San Francisco, he was a baby-beat in the sixties, knew some of the beat poets and is now a neo-beat. In his alternate career, he worked in Community Mental Health in San Francisco from 1979-2012. He took first place in the Jack Kerouac Poetry contest in 2015 and has been published in The Blue Moon Review, Interpretations and San Francisco Magazine. He is currently working on a project with a photographer friend on poem-texts and photos.

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