Bull's Bluff
A. Nowakowski
The details of memory leave a faint
sweet taste on my tongue, like
an envelope's sugar glue —
and I remember you, the prettiest
girl in Karns Middle School,
with long blonde hair,
and one eye green, one blue.
We were best friends, and all
those words imply about twelve year old
girls, inseparable, giggling, sliding
down the roof of your father's barn
while our big sister's screamed at us
to get down. The summer of 1977,
before high school, before
the advent of boys with chaw in their
cheeks, and dates and the shaving
of legs, we shared everything, like early
communists, the secret words and
lists of names for our children: Alexander,
Alexis, Courtney, and Cecil.
That summer the pokeberries burst in their velvet
poisonousness and we sank in the clay doing
handstands in the lake off Bull's Bluff,
and your father's tiny apple orchard began its annual
rot, and he sat inside, unemployed,
playing ragtime on the piano. The happiest day
was Saturday, when no one was home,
and we could talk as loud as preachers,
and make pancakes from the whole wheat batter
your mother had made before leaving
for the laundrymat. What has happened
that we no longer speak?
Time grinds us like a stone grinder,
we have become smooth and prettier,
you in Tennessee, me in Los Angeles,
and we try not to think of
each other, until somewhere
in the desert behind the eyes,
I dream of you, and your husband
who does not like me.
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