SPEAK NO EVIL

 

 

 

 

Try this experiment: on a fog floating night,
October, outdoors, on a white balloon,
shine a light.
Shine it hard on the open indigo eye,
then on the tight red lips.
See the whole ghost flick and flash
from chill blue to bloody brains and back.

If there are many of you doing it,
hear the weird parade shriek in the gloom.

 

Then the ghost pales to white.
My mother cannot remember one bad thing
about the grandchildren.

There is much to be said for denial.

 

For one week only, the painted sumac
touch their fiery fingers in the canopy
above the narrow loop
into the marsh.

What a fine wedding they would make!

 

Now, they are ash to touch,
like those old people
trembling into the car and sniffling away.
How could that driver be my father?

 

I want to pack all this in a getaway bag,
with spare underpants and comb.
I want to roll like a dog
in the leaves piled high for burning,
delirious in the wet, sweet, rot.

 

 

 

 

Slightly revised from previously published

in Thunder Sandwich and Poetpourri.
http://www.thundersandwich.com/ts22/page24.html

 

© Ann Neuser Lederer
http://home.windstream.net/lederer/ann/