When I am home, head bowed over the man I’ll ring in gold in
a year’s time, head now ringed in clover and red clay as I hover over him,
sticky with honeysuckles sweating in the heat as we hide between scuppernong
and muscadine, I don’t want to remember the vineyards excavating Pompeii, how
the ants crossed the soft leaves cheek to cheek with the maze of rock dug out
of old ash, as I cover him in skin soft as ash. Afterwards, bare feet on the
dirty raw marble of our front porch, as I burn a Camel Blue to stub and ash, I
want to see what I missed, my own piece of urban sprawl, my own dying town of
busted cement, the Gingko Bilbao greening, the only one on the street. I don’t
want to miss the forbidden foam of the afternoon cappuccino, the Sunday stroll
of families, elegantly shuffling along the second tier of upper city Spoleto,
children chasing pigeons. Picking through the decaying pecans from last season’s
falling, I don’t want to look up, expecting contrails, and see how the sky
opens without Montelucco’s head or the sepulchre of its sacred forest’s rotting
trees. I just want to undress my fiancé in a backyard sewed in sugar snap and
the sound of the cinnamon ladies pecking, cicadas deathly mating, part vines
thick with sour-skinned grapes starting to burst sweetness, and burst
sweetness. Forget Garibaldi Square on a Friday night in the smoke of the
bonfire fingering the empty clothesline, make a sacred forest from popped cans
of PBR.
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