Castaway, A Poem for Wilson

This is a tribute to my friend Sara, grounded in boring, provincial Paris by the terror of Iceland, while her friends gallivant in Turkey. They left her only a dated pop culture reference, and I thought immediately of this blog that I totally killed.

In the heady dot-com boom I heard
a rumor:
Tom Hanks was giving up the grin;
sending his mother
the FedEx uniform,
kept pressed in the closet
but never far from the chest.

"He's running for president,
or maybe playing one," they told me,
and all I could think of was an island,
scrap in a Hollywood dump.
A coconut tree, a wind machine,
and a painted volleyball,
mute and waiting.