Better than Billy! Beer Poetry with Keetje Kuipers at Willamette

Keetje Kuipers reads at Willamette University on Wednesday in the Hatfield Room at the Library.

You may recall "Across a Great Wilderness Without You."

Here's another beer poem, a summer verse a little wintry.

4th of July

If I have any romantic notions left,
please let me abandon them here
on the dashboard of your Subaru
beside this container of gas station
potato salad and bottle of sunscreen.
Otherwise, my heart is a sugar packet
waiting to be shaken open by some
other man’s hand. Let there be another town
after this one, a town with an improbable Western
name—Wisdom, Last Chance—where we can get
a room and a six-pack, where the fireworks
end early, say nine o’clock, before it’s really
gotten dark enough to see them because
everyone has to work in the morning.
I’m not asking for love anymore.
I don’t care if I never see a sailboat again.