August 13, 1961

I see it now: the dappled light
twining through the leaves
of the sweet gum tree,
where Gerald hammered the yellow pine
with nails stolen from homes
purchased on the GI Bill.
I supply our house with apple crates
filled with pulp fiction and comics,
as we retreat from glassy-eyed blonds,
wearing white blouses and pink poodle skirts;
their pony-tails bounce with each Elvis
skitter and roll. We huckleberry our way
through the summer riding the wind surf;
the limbs, lissome and frothy with green sap,
roll and pitch like a raft on the Mississippi.
Wasps buzz past onion-ed ears and skinned knees,
while ants savage the rough bark, sucking nectar
from the bleeding nodes of the sweet gum.
It's a portal, glassed as oblique
as Alice's mirror, and as porous.
Through this gate we walk on our heads
and hide when the hobos pass
under us and the jets stream overhead.
A crisis is brewing in Berlin
and everyone is on alert, except us.
We wait in our silenced space
for the call of the mothers at dusk.