I Don’t Recall His Name
I don’t recall his name
or his face, only that he was good looking,
not in a steely, square-jawed way,
but a softer sort of handsome
that suited his shyness.
What I do remember
is that he was tall and slim
and missing half an arm—
a tractor accident,
his roommate confided.
We never spoke of it,
never said much of anything,
though he was always polite,
grateful, I guess, to have someone
doing the legwork, the facetime.
His family had a farm in the mountains
and that’s where I imagined
he tended his secret garden.
I stopped by his dorm room
a couple times a week
to pick up baggies of marijuana
which I sold on campus in no time at all,
earning shares of my own.
I can still see his long back
as he weighed each bag,
the blue flannel shirt he wore,
one sleeve moving swiftly,
the other hanging useless.
I could not pick him
out of a yearbook,
this boy I never knew.
Yet there he is,
stowed in my past,
where the rest of his life
can’t hurt him.
Jean Ryan 