A poem from 1986: lines

Lines


Lines across your face,
Sun-dapple in an Apple-butter autumn.
So long ago I have only the pungent test in my nostrils,
and the image of three
white hairs curving between your breasts.

I went back there one day in spring
with honeysuckle perfuming the azure skies.
I walked barefoot, in the cool chocolate mud,
ebony tadpoles wriggling between my toes,
and a bullfrog croaked at dusk
out by the rotting boathouse.
The slatted windows
of Mrs. Leschner's store pass
sunbeams in my memory,
laying lines across your face,
and dancing in the dust.


The end


Nearly all of that is not true. The three hairs are true. I remember them, and her 12 string guitar at the Ethical Culture Society Summer Camp in Manhattan, in 1973. I found a bunch of paper copies of poems I wrote in and before 1986. Most of them are embarrassingly bad. This one, maybe, is just bad.