Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Looking Yet Again Toward Our Street

No matter how orange these mornings get, we
Keep staring at this blackened walnut stump, all the while imagining
A flipped canoe with both of us beneath it
Breathing hard on the dark water.

Each time my toes
Scrape the slimy stones on the bottom, I know that yours
Are still stretching, and that your thoughts
Of cold involve neither obsidian nor mammoths nor two story icicles
Because you annihilated all of that minutes
Ago with a sip of coffee.

Similarly, if I were to claim that the lawn at our feet
Is healthy, and if you were to rip some up with your toes:
You couldn’t sip the itch away, likewise
Not the dampness. But derelict and hirsute
Would disappear like sugar. The wind

May or may not be cold and quiet on that particular morning.
And whether Daryl’s sprinklers will be tchk tchk tchking
Is something I will probably be too loud-brained to notice.

But this purple—that is something
These two mornings will most certainly have
In common. My feet

In this spot; you puff-faced over there, still thinking
About coffee; and this ragged swath of purple,
Wide and
Lit and fading—far beyond this row
Of roofs about to remember their colors.

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