Poetry by Lewis Leicher
We all have personal landmarks—public places that matter
to us for private reasons, with no brass plaques to say why.
My favorite was the big wooden phone booth, in the lobby
of a midtown New York hotel, where I first really kissed a girl
I was in love with, in December ’72.
We’d met the prior summer at a camp in Vermont. I can’t
recall why, but she was visiting the City before Christmas.
For those in later generations: pay phones were everywhere then
and everyone used them. Calls cost ten cents. For my peers and elders:
remember … indoor booths used to be cleaner.
I visited my landmark occasionally over the years until
the hotel, which opened in 1912, converted to apartments
in the mid-1980s. Progress, for some … but why
didn’t my personal Landmarks Preservation Commission
save that beautiful oak booth from demolition?
Instead, it exists solely in memory, mine and probably hers
and maybe some hotel guests’—we were, after all, a real-life
big-city-teen-romance-movie cliché (not that I knew that then).
But how can genuine passion ever be clichéd? That could
have been engraved on the non-existent plaque.
I won’t be using her name. I don’t kiss and tell, not even
after decades. But how can embraces from so long ago
feel like they happened just yesterday? Our landmark is gone,
but my love for her kisses lives again, when I close my eyes
and pretend that an old phone booth welcomes us in.
Lewis Leicher has returned to poetry, now that he has retired, after an almost forty-year break (for which poetry has not yet forgiven him). During that break, he worked as an attorney, including for almost twenty years for WebMD. He has lived in San Diego since 2001 and, before that, lived mostly in and around New York City.