Ultimate Innocence

Ultimate Innocence


When was the last farmer
wholly in love with his milk cows?

1860’s, you think?

Perhaps 1914,
or thereabouts?

Or it could’ve
been during the dustbowl years
just before FDR’s sympathetic
intervention.

Too bad Gene Wilder’s taxi
circling the moon once too many times
finally tossed him onto cold skid row
to slake his impossible lust
with a single, trembling drop
of Woolite.

Sorry about that!

Too bad the Confederate train
snaking the Blue Ridge mountains
didn’t pause
long enough for its boxcar
of genetic mules
to slake
themselves
on tourist ticket-stubs.

So, how do we climb
like gardenias
the sultry torso of present-day
civilization
during a primordial hurricane
named Katrina, or George W. Bush?

How, indeed, do we skate
the innocent length
of this melancholy ironing board
stretched yoga-like before us?

And how do we know
that white polo balls
flattened into retirement
won’t grow extinct
like dingy cauliflowers
routinely ignored by our diminutive
selves along the produce aisle?

Who knows?

So, I mounted
that black and white pinto
I’d been dreaming about
these past six months.

He said, Let’s go to the caves
of the outlaws
from Wyoming
or Kerouac;
I’d like that.

But, instead, I reached for Saturn,
barely recognized
these past 50 years,
only to find her rings squashed
in an ashtray,
only to witness
the demise
of briefly
what once was
the ultimate innocence
of raucous crows
now oozing tiny drops
of insidious ink
from my adult imagination.

Alan Britt

Posted over on Ken Again