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Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections of poems: Trying To Help The Elephant Man Dance (The Backwaters Press, 2007) and Just Beautiful (New York Quarterly Books, 2010.) His third collection, Election Night and the Five Satins, will be published early in 2016 by Glass Lyre Press. He has poems published and forthcoming in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Blackbird, Bellevue Literary Review, PANK, North Dakota Quarterly, december magazine, Plume Poetry Journal, The Southeast Review and Stand Magazine (U.K.) among others. He lives in Cambridge, MA, with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

Tim Suermondt

AN AMERICAN ON LES GOBELINS

I’m walking along thinking of Roy Rodgers

and why I do must remain a mystery,

although it might be a vestige of the exuberant

nostalgia we Americans have mastered, carry with us,

a hardy optimism everyone loves—even those

who rant and rave in their claimed hatred of it.

I grab a falafel, sit on a bench on a park island

surrounded by traffic and am absolutely content

watching pedestrians, vehicles go by—on the warmest

October day Paris has seen in decades, mocking

the people who believe the world can never be perfect.

I’m not sure I see Roy Rodgers on Trigger galloping along

side a bus until I hear “Cowboy, cowboy” and I guess

it’s true—I raise an arm and wave the falafel in salute to Roy,

to America on the clear horizon waving back.

— Tim Suermondt