Calle Florista

Calle Florista

Don't you remember
our little house on Calle Florista,
the calle with lots of flowers?
There weren't flowers so much as
cats, at least a hundred, lounging in the neighbor's yard
while the bushes roiled with kittens.

They weren't kittens so much as
pecan trees and weeds of the nightshade family,
unwatered except on irrigation days
when the whole neighborhood stood up to its knees in water.

And the water was not water, so much as
gravel, and the Calle was not a street, but more
a bunch of rocks lined up in a particular way.
And the "Florista" started last year. The maps
still say Iris Lane.

There were no irises so much as one fat Sharpei,
the guard dog to Chinese Kings said the uncle next door,
as Sassy yowled in the yard.
Sassy was not a guard dog so much as
not very smart,
though Tio was kind of Kingly
sitting in his minivan with a Keystone Light.

What did I do all day?
The boy hit my car with a stick.
His sister stood in the plastic swimming pool.
When would the pecans drop? Tio was waiting.

It wasn't so much waiting as the kids and Tio
worrying about the occasional helicopter
battering by,
the dog and the cats, who were not cats at all
maybe.
And me in that little house, writing about
our street which changed every day
subtly and in complicated ways.
But for you it was most different-
you were the one who didn't exist,
except as someone
who did not live on Calle Florista.




Connie Voisine
Posted over on Campbell Corner