Excerpt from Red Signature

RIFE SILL

I come to a window with yellow curtains, picture
Observing an abstract number of green tomatoes,
A cake of bow rosin, amber scarred over with white.
I tell you, I fell in love with a boy, not because

He played the cello, but because I could imagine him
Playing the cello. From a dream I picked his door,
Turquoise paint, not new. He sent me a postcard
From Budapest, that much remains true. He was Jewish.

In history, one walks where two walked before, alongside
The Danube, in my mind, curtains splay in a gust,
Sheet music takes wing, in his life, he turned up his collar.

Beyond the blue-green door, lovers laugh, oh they are
Jars of honey. A splash of sapphire emotes
Inside one of them, cast by a cobalt, diagonal pane.

SCHOOL TEACHER'S DITTY

I wish I were a matchstick drifting
drifting free on Black Bear Creek

Clouds all stretched out on pallets
boughs rolling back like a filmstrip
the wind just waving me on

Noon whistle, go choke on an old chicken bone
I could not care less

I am just a matchstick drifting
free and easy on down the creek
on down to Arkansas

Copyright © 1997 by Mary Leader. All rights reserved.