An old woman blows out 78 candles on her birthday cake, but one refuses to go out, no matter how hard she blows. It burns with a blue flame and whispers a name she hasn’t heard in 40 years. Your poem is her conversation with that candle. What does she decide to do: let it keep burning, or pinch it out?

Stubborn Flame

It flickers, but does not go out,
this last flame.
It is as though this birthday has no wish to be over.
As though it is the one love affair never finished.

All of the others
claimed an ending––
not because their story
was  necessaritly finished,
but because it wasn’t allowed to go on
lest it extinguish the stories
that would came after it.

Story after story,
each with its own ending,
until this one,
which, perhaps,
demands
a new beginning.

I come from a very small town in South Dakota where we have an all-school reunion every 5 years.  I left that small down when I went to college and never returned, other than for vacations.  And when I left my home town, I left my boyfriend of two years.

He had already decided not to go to colllege, and I was determined to travel the world. During my first year of college, he drove the 7 hours to see me with some of this friends and I made it clear to him that I didn’t see any future for us.

Later he refused to talk to me when I came home and he finally married another woman  and came about a tragic end when his front-end loader slipped down a dam embarnkment into  the water, flipped over on its side and he was drowned.

It was on my fortieth class reunion that a fellow came up to me at a party and said, “You don’t know me, as I’m from White River, but I came to this reunion even though I didn’t go to your school, particularly to find you and talk to you. I’m Nick Didier’s cousin, and I just wanted you to know that he really did love you!

True story.