Yellow Ditches
The autumn evening sat still like a child,
Biting its lip as it drug forth the exhaustng idea of things.
Opened its eyes once and watched the ocre and mustard by its knees,
Spoke like soft and fell asleep.
I carried it's eyelids for you.
Drug them through the trees, and laid slowly the black hairs
like a bundle of sticks at your feet, clawing the earth gentley
Like a steady cat, lapping the cold steady mauve sky
as the moon laid like a halo by my zipper
I felt the cold.
I blessed the rocks.
I cried against the grass.
Tasting the dew by my brow.
Never losing what I had came for.
Never realizing what I had borne.
And your breath slow,
Like a gray smoke that got lost beneath my ears.
And I never heard,
And I never said,
Only a shadow tonight.
Only a sidewalk this morning.
Only a highway in the evening.
And I wait once again for summer.
And I wait once again for that green blanket that lays soft
Against the trees, so I can place my fingers.
Against soft driven chess pieces within the marble of a foodcourt floor.
For a thousand miles against that open birth.
For a weak hundredth cry in the vanilla morning
That tasted like copper on my tongue.
For a time when I can sit against the wind on my balcony
Open that book that only reads in June, only reads
Like the flat paint of a lake, that takes on the color of your
Skin... before I saw you against the couch.
The last time I saw you, before the hospital
Ant those empty corelle hallways.
And I tasted you once
With an IV needle that leaked upon my tongue.
Tasted tan like that child you saw by the wire fence
Tan like the sand you once fell upon
Tan like the gold buildings of Morocco
Tan like the gilded pages of a worn Giddeon's Bible
Tan like an old book
And smelling like paper and dust.
And smelling.
And you had nothing, remember, offering old
Pine needles, that you had somehow won in a game of
Checkers, and I looked, and seen, truly... you.
With the beige and blue of shadows on my apartment wall
With the soft driven hands of that women once who convinced
Love to lie in a valley.
Who once convinced love to climb a backyard fence into a
Fallowed garden, without the reassurance of her hand.
And she forgot her lips by the conveince store,
Who convinced her son,
Who convined her mother,
Who had lost her father,
And I, still mad from the train ride, kneeling
Amoungst old cans and Georgia dirt,
And have nothing to give,
Nothing but a handful of teeth, that I had found on the trip.
And two flaccid keys of white ivory that I had pawned
In a game of Chinese checkers, over tea, under opium,
And the mud that didn't smoke like it should of.
It smoked like that time I left you in the parking lot,
written like an old journal with your words held to it like masking tape.
painted brown with the dirt.
And tomorrow you will be flying off too a place without roads,
But still happy.
© 2007 Layne L'Heureux