The poem begins with a memory and turns a corner into a meaning I couldn’t have anticipated. A spur-of-the-moment choice to cross the street to the library by the last lines yields a life strategy. In writing, I’ve found that sometimes a memory is like the egg that must break to make the omelet.•
What you choose
is what uses you find
in the world
or what uses you.
I remember reading Duncan
in the L.A. Public Library
1964,
just off the Greyhound
on my way to San Francisco:
downtown a big dustbowl
for all I knew,
I crossed Times Mirror Square
thinking I could find
something over there
to while away an hour
before the bus left.
And so I did—
“In Memory of Two Women”
in an early limited edition
I was allowed to peruse
and inhale all its syllables
and weigh all the gambles
on the white light
of the page—
a life of exaltation
and a way to be outside
the bus station.
This poem appears in Issue 33 of Alta Journal.
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Aram Saroyan is the author of Still Night in L.A.: A Detective Novel and many other books of prose and poetry. His Complete Minimal Poems received the 2008 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His memoir Before I Forget will be published in 2026.
