On the Red Wall
I can find a map of anywhere in the world I’d like to go
but I want to stay here, in your hallway. I can study
the calm architecture of your framed photographs:
the State House, the University Bell Tower, measure
the proportions of your mosaics or the Dadaist collage
you carried from Washington wrapped in a polo shirt.
If I lean toward your map, I can push pins into Chicago
and the Queen of All Saints school, the nuns who swatted you
when you asked where angels tucked their wings to sleep.
I can blow my breath over the waves of Lake Michigan,
the summers in the sun, Lansing and the slag heaps of Detroit,
Cleveland’s smokestacks, Indiana’s rolling fields:
your military marches through the corn. I can stick
a stamp on Alaska where your sisters lived for years,
or the little Spanish town hanging in the hills
behind San Francisco where you worked against the war.
How far south must I go before falling off the map,
before the Everglades slow suck, St. Augustine’s decay?
I know this is the last kiss. I have pasted green sea glass
to mark the spot in Maine. Coastal waves break over my toes.
Wind’s brave display blows leaves across our slippered feet.
I’d rather plan for dirt to smear on Massachusetts,
mud mixed with cotton from the Worcester mills,
while I (oh, so carefully!) unpin my heart from the wall,
never moving from this spot, some Salem witchcraft
blowing smoke from hooked rugs underfoot, while I make
this the map that spells your life, your own red wall of fame.
First published in Comstock Review
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