for P.W.
#1950s #bluerinse #boyhood #growingup #hair #hairdresser #kansas #memories #midwest #mother #nostalgia #wichita
Be still now with the Earth. Still with the Sun, the Land, Sea
After you uncork him and he appears in a serpentine of white smoke. Before he grants you
The courtly old lady, widowed for decades, and her calico cat, who take each afternoon sun
When the Moon moves between our Sun, Earth and up-raised eyes, through the long-held breath of our wisdom-keepers,
At precisely 9.25. When the moon, the first and most abundant one of the new year,
The only thing warm tonight in the deep winter sky ~ and soon to occlude. The Wolf Moon, Ice Moon, Old Moon.
Quite a sight to behold: a woman of sun, reclining on the grass, in a meadow, abundantly recumbent, hair and limbs lush with heat
It arrives on a warm white cloud. It arrives on soft rolls of ocean waves along a sand pebbled shore. It arrives on a bed
You, Picasso aigu in your summer straw shading blue eyes and sailor stripes, juggling a bubble of cold wine.
Good to mark it each year on the world’s calendar. But I celebrate it every day.
To ask your Self. In the still of the night, whether bright-starred or half-mooned. In the midst of the day,
Maybe, like Marcel, Monsieur Proust, in Paris, it begins with a bite of a madeleine.
Red lights flaring like Roman candles at empty intersections. Headlights wanding like blind men’s sticks
All the way. Your eyes, senses, sensibilities. Fill them
However tender, and moist. The golden skin, supremely crisp. The stuffing,