She had the lighting of lions,
the hopefulness of the sun and the spontaneity of pinkies,
shocking green eyes that just kept widening
inside the outside,
giant caverns
that as a child you fill with awe and candy but as an adult
bills and regret.
I couldn’t find a beginning or an end or a coat-hook for her smile.
I didn’t understand math, but I understood the infinity of this;
so I placed sunglasses on my heart
before it was cool.
This was a break from vehement mothers and their Brillo pad washcloths.
The kind that rubbed against you in their obnoxious eagerness,
like the opinions of people I was about to know for years.
On the Tilt a Whirl her laugh would keep going in the direction
we had just spun from.
The centrifugal force of joy that pushes back the depression
of lost innocence.
The streaks of her eyes flared like dizzy paintings,
with a violent shake our hips clacked
on the track, all around us chips of rust.
The whirr of colors stays beyond momentum
This wasn\'t the lifeless stuff of museums
but a desperate future softness
amidst the gritty textures of fucking adulthood.
Coming out of the grocery store
I held her hand,
that feeling where every part of your body is not calm
except your hand, grounded in simple beauty, the flesh
is truly grateful when it wants to be nowhere else
but here.
I would later need these moments, this romantic Everest
in the everyday the leveling of things
vaguely, naively aware of the difficulties that lay ahead spread out like a baseball diamond; Cancer dodge-ball, 55 year olds that still blame their mother’s, Fathers with exploding chests, the mauling darkness of wild animal eyed schizophrenic brothers.
Watching people twirl the sadness about themselves as if spinning cotton candy, just about everything tastes like paper.
How would I know the simple interlocking of fingers might shut out this world.
Okay not a church, not a steeple, so there is no world, there are no people
but there was Alice Ward’s smile and she had the lighting of lions.
E_Mail: spentcattle@yahoo.com
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