Arbor Wist
Spread wide,
I drape the arbor
With scent
and scattered petals
Shadow
evocation of little girls with
Frill filled
baskets.
Bored,
alone, I gaze across the path,
Over the
stone wall
To the St
Johns
That now deserted
waterway
Once a
hotbed of commerce.
A sculler
crew plies their craft
Stroke stroke
stroke
The murmur
of the drummaster beating galley time.
A child
stands on the wall,
Her mother
paralyzed with fear
Until a
stranger throws an arm out,
Swings the
child to safety
And carries
her off to the sprawling banyon tree.
I hear him
say, climb here. Mama, come, she’s fine.
The stranger
approaches me
Takes a seat
on my concrete bench
Dabbles his
toes in lily pond
Staring out at
the amber sky.
He turns to
the woman,
The woman I hadn’t
notices in my sculling revery.
She clasps
an open copy of Virgil’s Aeneid.
The murmuring
was her voice, slow Latin,
Rounding the
words.
He turns to
her, intent on her profile,
the curve of
her nose
the length
of her fingers on the page.
Leans over
and brushes the scar on her shoulder with his lips.
I drop some
petals on her book
And close my
vines around them.
