free

you’re the one with a handful of broken twigs

bench’s memorial plaque pressed upon your neck –

that hiss not wind but windblown trees and water

that lowing not a cow but a flash road bike –

Kawasaki Ninja, maybe, or one of the red Italians –

revving out high in a hurry to get somewhere, bound

for somewhere that will, through endless ploys, gainsay the haste –

across the creek a man tops a yellow ball

it lands closer to the sixteenth tee than the divot –

his curses seem to unnerve a rat swimming by

and you, with your six pieces, milky and green, filed

in angst to equal length, are ready to receive it

as it scrabbles slick through the tall weeds towards you

then there isn’t any movement anymore.

she might as well be posing for a portrait – perhaps she is –

portrait of the sheer face of a meaning, of thick black hair

a mien embalmed in her childhood, in agave syrup

diffused like ashes through lexical trenches and shoals

a certain impassiveness not cold, not clement – a scarf

around her neck, her eyes out, a crossing of bare boy’s legs –

becalmed as a woman who knows that she’s loved but still free.