Holly Street Remembered

Woodcut by Charles Turzak 1939


Holly Street Remembered

It is time to close the door
on another bastion of my mind.
I call upon this recollection
to succumb to a burial spell for
rememberances spent.

Slowly he comes, as honeysuckle scents
on a languid breeze.
He leans on a dust swirled streetlight
suspended by a single strand of darkness.
This soul Lazarus lived on the streets,
sharpened his life on the whetstone
of pebbled blacktop.
His face is absent, having been absorbed
into one of the shadowed expanses of houses
that dodges direct moonlight,
refuses distinction in my memory.

His name is every name
on the road where I grew up.
Holly Street, now relegated to ghostly status,
spectra of dirt and soul and lost dreams.
He dances to Sly Stone and the Ohio Players
in slow marionette poses;
Spotlighted by fireflies and whiskey gleams
from bottles perpetually open and half full.
His shoes are polished souls,
black, wet and cracked as a cooking cauldron
softened by morning dew.

A woman approaches barefoot.
Hair straightened, flaxen.
Skin dark as blackened oak.
A memory scar of forced bussing
lies like a sapling across the back of one thigh.

His feet tap a sound of 100 broomsticks
on a 100 tennis balls.

From behind him, she raises his arms,
uses the frying pan flats of her hands
to beat a sense of her drum song
upon his suddenly naked torso.
Pushing out a days/decades pain from his soul;
squeezings from a bitter cane stalk.
A sound unnamed escapes his lips.
The moan catches the air as a sail
as he lowers his arms,
believing the emanation belongs to someone else
who couldn't cope as he had.

Their heads lower,
Lower.
Arm in arm they retreat to shadows.
With them, goes my mind,
Closing forever on this place
that sparks once and then dies,
Leaving in my heart a sentiment
that melancholy saxes only lean towards.

Indigo Moor

Posted over on Eskimo Pie