and with gray hair she’s gone

between Hannah and her sisters,

New York of remembered standards

by way of Woody Allen

and a first girlfriend with ringlets

and pearls of wisdom, who knew

the tunes and not her daddy.

He was hardly dandled, and she less,

but, oh, he’s talking and she’s sleeping,

waiting for the show to start.

Stage mothers hum endless overtures.

The plane ascends into sunrise.

He squirms in her lap, fending off

what doesn’t feel like love.

Such is the languor of childhood.

Such are promises from the dead.

Such are the perils of casting.

She fails to tell the boy whom to choose:

Barbara Hershey, Diane Wiest, Mia herself?

He will stammer like Michael Caine,

lost in a memory of her smile.

That is a movie old as melancholy itself.

George Guida is the author of eleven books, most recently the novels The Uniform (Guernica World Editions, 2024) and Posts from Suburbia (Encircle Publications, 2022), and the poetry collections Zen of Pop (Long Sky Media, 2020) and New York and Other Lovers (Encircle, 2020). His new collection The Fulfillment Center is forthcoming from Foothills Publishing.