Crunchy, sweet, outside on Signe’s patio, touch of bliss on the tongue, smear of lost kisses, the young woman offering coffee refills from a giant push-handle carafe that dispenses 20 years of forgiveness, a millennium less in purgatory. What wind what sun what odor of unnamed white buds disappearing between the gloss of salt-known leaves. Strides caked with sand. Beach-damp sweaters a half- sigh, life gone baggy, gone singing where palmettos bend to the God of blown cheeks, the damsels with moss-hung hair. This you and I a tart sprinkle on the world’s flat palm, a mere jiggle, a sonorous dream. Or pock and whack when the eyelids unstick a dawn, and pelicans ungroup in mid-air, yet slide into each other’s wake, a gravity their tug, where moon might tumble yet stay put in the vacant sky, the burned-out night.
John Allman | Fruit-Fly Memory Contents | Mudlark No. 48 (2012)