The Old Swigwam - St Pete Beach
Fathers' Day Morning
the garden
was suborned by night
and filled
with drowsy poppies sleeping,
all
calmative with opiate dew,
crystalline
in the morning sun,
like a Waterford
web of drawn glass thread,
spun by the
rackham fingertips of
deeply
indigo spiderwort blue.
a bearded guy
with protruding gut
walks back
and forth on the beach,
his hand an
amber beer bottle:
shaman drum,
prayer wheel, rosary…
when I cut
the weeds, he sees me, and
I do not
speak; when he mutters at me,
I shrug and
say: Tansi Nehiyawetan?
--
notes
opiate dew - an expression of Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)
rackham - thin and elongated like finger in the sketches of Arthur Rackham
spiderwort - a type of flower my grandma grew... look at a picture of it.
Tansi Nehiyawetan? - what are you saying? I am not very sociable with people who carry beer bottles as their totems...
I just got this up. We were at the Island for Fathers' Day, and then at my mother's, and there are no internet hookups anywhere. I suppose I could have asked the neighbors...
--
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