Here's your receipt

White shirt

Navy skirt

Warm eyes

She smiles

when she smiles.

A man might find a word,

or even two.

But now it’s Kodachrome,

sweet imagination,

and thank you Mr. Simon.

There must have been fifty ways

not to leave that bookstore.

Too old and too late to have said

what mumbled in that soft spot in my head -

my skull from the Jurassic,

or perhaps only the vinyl era,

Gridiron Courage or Mr. Asimov hiding in the stacks.

Other guys sinking the basket

And saying the right things.

And underneath that navy and white,

that bookstore clerk was

just another one in a million

I might have spoken to.

But my words are buried deep,

mere fragments of fossilized bones,

my shovel just circles again and again at vinyl’s end.

First there was that girl in Junior High who never knew,

and then a million, million more of her kind

all the way up through Cenozoic time -

Girls and women to whom this cave man dumbly wished

that I could have finally read

from the back of my mushmelon head

and perhaps once have said what I never said.