“It’s depressing.” “Then why do it?”
Out sick yesterday, slept most of Monday night
to this morning. A sole
banana looks good on my desk. Last night
Mom sliced up a cantaloupe that looked
banged and bruised, had been keeping
in the bottom of my refrigerator
for a couple of weeks. It was
knock-your-socks off delicious. Mushmelon,
indeed! A ferry’s bright, white stripe of wake
slices a diagonal line halfway between
Treasure Island’s northernmost tip
and Embarcadero Four, there it goes,
fading like the patriotic exhaust
(red, white, and blue) behind the
Blue Angels during yesterday’s air-show,
Mom and I on the rooftop watching what we can
over Nob Hill, the occasional eardrum-popping,
low-flying passes directly overhead. Like we didn’t
hear those birds day-in, day-out while I was growing up
barely a mile from Ft. Chaffee land, bombs and flares
omnipresent on humid summer nights,
the window over my bed facing south to Potato Hill,
so wracked with “war practice”
it’s amazing it kept its perfectly conical shape,
didn’t flatten into a field of oblivion
between Lake Charleston and the Ouachitas.
But no, there it still is,
one giant blue tit in search of another.
