she was yellow green and orange
with the midweek headache
And a tower built out of old camera tripods
Came crawling around the corners of her desk
And built themselves into a wailing wall of nostalgia and comfort
She was steel, glass and tiny broomstick fibers
Then bent and broke and sometimes flew if a wind
Was strong enough to send these pieces gliding
She was a goodbye glance and a morning smile
Covered in a bright polka dot umbrella meant for days
When it would rain down in Caribbean size storms of divorce and also floating sphere that were full of pretty lilies….soft and precious in his sight.
She felt a lot of things.
Some were heavy, some were four leaf clovers that children chewed to see if they tasted like that sour mint grass that reminded me of the times we used to play by the creek and didn’t know the words paycheck, bill, traffic citation, government or even regret.
It was those some honeysuckle Saturday where I reached over the fence to peek around and see if I could find a true love sitting down. A true love could be a toad, a bee, another yard, a someone else I’d like to be. It was that sap that stuck like glue and smelled like trees and scraped up knees from climbing for pinecones in that tree, beside the hummingbird afternoons as California calls to me. The memory swings from a tall tree and down a rope and on a branch that nearly touched the ground before the launch of me into the sky or yesterday’s by and by. It gets me here. The words, the daffodils, my mother reading Whitman in my ear. Some days scars curls up and amount to tiny slimy things in snail shells that caravan away with spring time rain, in their place come the pavement crisp with sunshine and the dampness left from the dew, the sprinklers, the unusual visitor that was orange county rain. On my bike I biked past olive wood school again. I counted ten houses and twenty people who lived beside me and I never knew their names but I liked the flags in their yards, the light brown wood of their garages the noises as they return from work, from even school, while hiding in the bougainvillea I a child walked slowly by and told the giant world a childlike hi and ran find a find own place to stare at the sky, a roof, a a tree, a moment surrounded by only me me me.