field brook court

It was golden there, before everything was serious and solid.

It was a season of fireflies and sticky shoulders, and streetlights calling us home for supper.

Our childhood home is the first place we learned textures; we were so low to the ground, while mysterious queens strutted about.

I would know that brown carpet anywhere.

You and me, this is where we learned to speak and cry out, and what was too severe for our small, fresh bodies.

We fried an egg on the manhole there, just left of center, in the dead-end circle that lassoed our early years.

It was where we ran home from two houses down, sweaty and flushed, when Mama called to say Granny was gone, and she needed us home and hushed.

She whispered that day, how am I going to tell Jimmy.

We were space takers and fully free, single file and dirty all over,

Marching around with the audacity of anything holy.

We had a hideout, of course, in the closet.

We crayoned the walls and crowned it a place to house our secrets.

It was the first place of all the places you and I had.

And it was the last place I took you, in a cloth bag.

You told me I could always find you there, and so I’ll go there tonight,

after supper.

I will cross the plains and the evergreens and travel by wind,

Searching for your essence in the glittering asphalt of our circle.

And we can take a slow walk and you can catch me up on your secrets,

Even though you already know mine.