Festival Poem 2: Beauty

a balled-up towel in a pile of logs

orbs on the brow

of a gravel hill

with the windy urgency of clouds

overtopping the sun, and scorpions

waiting out the midday heat, and can I say

the foggy fixity

of the coloured spots on our eyes –

she conducts her straw to the bottom

of the coconut and sits her wet black

bathers on the powdery dirt beside me –

the blonde hairs around her navel

glow like gem specks in the dry bed

of a creek, and bent forward,

her little stomach dissembles

into folds and kidney shapes

– I think of the blushing creases    

she will have when she sits up,

and how crazily she’ll stare

as I iron them out – after a time

she asks about the towel,

says it looks like a pearl in a ribcage,

that we should take it to the lost and found –

there’s a lost and found here, right?

but I don’t know – this might be

a hippie festival but it doesn’t mean

we ought to discover beauty

in every trifling thing – then

she points to a little naked girl

splashing in the mud wallow

and says, no, I don’t think she is,

at least not like the towel –

instead of asking why, I ask about coconut water

and remark that the clouds, purplish before, have turned

pink like the down in a cheap Disney sleeping bag.