My braid lay in its secret autumnal gold and dusk brunette
coiled in a shoebox in her closet.
Furious and confusingly touched I returned it to it’s alter;
Saint's relics behind a mirrored sliding door.
The foot of virgin childhood hair intended for wigs and instead,
hoarded by my mother alongside cast-off teeth
and indecipherable journal entries
and Crayola drawings of fantastical horses
with stiff necks and stand up manes.
You sprung from streets and cities of hot seasons
redolent of tar and fetid waterways, river being a misnomer
for these sluggish grey channels with concrete banks
and chainlink fence scenery-
You didn't know the smell of the sun, only chlorine haze
and burning rubber bodied machinery.
I had inhaled it;
summer dreaming in sweat stained cool sheets of faded paisley
sun dried on the line that divided the lilacs from the hayfield.
The farm! Three years gone and summer with it
Still internally protesting the turn from the highway to town.
I had jumped up to lead you to secret meadows where does hid their fawns
dappled in sun and wild youth, before I remembered.
It was winter anyway and the barn to the trees to the sky
would be uniformly gray.