Snapshot from my neighborhood: A man walks by with a little girl. Tan skin, red lips, dark eyes, turquoise flowered sundress. Spring comes to Philly! She’s not his daughter, she’s his girlfriend’s daughter. He has white pants; you think you can see his legs through the fabric when the sun’s a certain way behind him but it’s an illusion. His hair dyed uniformly, color of a wild animal raised in domesticity since birth, glossy and of no use to itself. He talks to the ladies in Italian so American even I understand: A birthday party of his Nonna at Ristorante Villa di Roma, his father from Calabria, a small mountain village. He speaks Italian—elbow on knee, one loafer (white) propped on the step—because Serafina, the only Neapolitan for blocks, took one dark look at the bud-lipped girl, said “Italiana!” The girl doesn’t know Italian, goes twirlingly down the street plucking the hem and straps of her turquoise dress to Serafina’s puny plum tree, stands under it, spies back to see if she can pull down some pretty purple leaves without Serafina noticing. But doesn’t dare.
Lovely, Daisy.
And a snapshot from my neighborhood:
My Freedom Lawn
–”the flag of my disposition”—
is full of chickweed and wild violets
the way a child’s mind is full of games.
I say to my neighbors, Let’s play hide
and seek or roller bat sometime,
but all I get are sighs and headshakes,
their leashed dogs pulling nervously
past the waist-high wilderness
that surrounds our house.
To think that a blend of fescue
and rye, unmowed and unedged, says something
definable about the self
is a riddle I answer to suit myself.
To think that a plot of lawn grass
is me to neighbors is more than I hoped for.
I give my yard its freedom as a father
gives a child a box of crayons and paper,
hoping it will discover Eden.
The lawn is not the glacier nor the ocean
that once covered the ground here
with its secrets.
The self is not a green pasture to lie
down in nor a graveyard of unmarked regrets.
You can’t step in the same lawn twice,
or so they say.
If my neighbors erect molded concrete yard art
and birdhouses, must I do the same?
What would it be like to find a satyr
in every blackberry bush,
a wood nymph behind every kudzu leaf?
John Blackard
http://www.johnablackard.com
An interesting opportunity for writers and editors!
http://crazyhorse.cofc.edu/