To Carrboro

To Carrboro

Here, Autumn is not bitter
There's no death in winter


Josephine Foster

Carrboro, baby,
I don't know where Chapel Hill ends
and you begin
exactly,
except I start to feel it
right at that V
where Rosemary Avenue breaks off
from Main Street
and I sometimes see wispy shadows
of heavy black cases
being lifted into the Cat's Cradle.
O town of slim-hipped
hip graduate students
wearing torn bluejeans
and drinking fine wine,
or flicking cigarette ash
(magically harmless),
from their blue bicycles;
town of coffee shops
where you sit alone for hours and smile
at emails, where just outside
the bathroom,
dirty walls advertise
secret wonders, like how
on a whim last night,
I saw a flyer for a trippy opera folk singer
who, just this second,
was singing songs down the road,
and I sped recklessly over,
then tiptoed into one
of your tiniest bars—
the one with the red walls
and the kind strangers crossed-legged on the floor
like a third-grade class
hypnotized by a good story,
watching as the singer,
gazed softly down,
tapped her shoe
on the stage's edge,
and stopped the heart
of the room,
no one making a sound
even to get up for a drink,
for fear they might wake any of us
from the dream of her song.