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Remember that summer when we were kings?

We were the kings, the kings for a summer,

sun-skinned, bruised & bleeding,

wetting spear grass with our mouths,

mown grass and mosquito crowned.

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At night the TV was the only light

in the house except for the cars from the street,

running headlights up the wall and lighting up the hall,

like the sun would light the culvert

at the creek.

 

Where we were licked clean like nursing puppies,

pulling ourselves up the riverbank by the roots of the trees

into the fields of purple thistles,

enacting the miracles of loaves and fishes,

and everything was either tinder or flame

from when the animals were brought

before Adam to name.

 

Together we were kings, the kings of summer

and the days stretched into each other,

over thick blankets of fields stitched with thorns

from the mesquite, with the hours

moving through our bodies as a heart beat.

 

Cloud sitting behind the fireworks stand,

we exhaled June into July.

We would bike to the rec center through

the neighbor's yards, flattening bills

for the vending machines and hammering nickels

to the size of quarters to play Joust or Eight Ball Deluxe

at the 7 Eleven.

 

And July was swept into August with a broom

of jasmine laying against the peeling paint-chip-back

of the tool shed, with all its weight

like your cur pup would lean against me,

when I sat at the end of the doc,

fishing the stock tank.

 

And the cottonwood snowing over the lawn

sung hymns to the knot of toads under the steps of the patio

and to the water striders making rings on the pond.

 

We nailed rungs of ladders up the trunks of the trees

like the teeth of a zipper, and we left our shirts

in the branches like cicada shells or as a flood leaves debris.

 

We flew with the fanfare of plastic bags

on the tips of the twigs, spinning like windmills,

twirling like helicopter seeds.

 

 

It stopped raining that summer except for the Bodark

that rained horse apples making solid thuds on the streets

rolling around the roulette curves of the cul-de-sacs

like the eddies created between the hardened flows of cement poured into the little streams by contractors behind the construction sites.

 

And the grasshoppers called atop their grass steeples to the roofers mopping tar and cutting strips of flashing, to get themselves born again.

 

And the ranchers hung poisoned coyotes on the fence posts

because they said, it kept the prairie wolves away.

 

And the honeysuckle thickets moved softly with the wind like a girl

letting her hair down at the foot of your bed.

 

Remember that fig tree fanning its leaves against the window screen

as big as a man's hand and the heat through the afternoons,

laying thick with a plastic texture over the tarmac,

that seemed to slow the motion of the laundry on the line

like it was underwater?

 

 

I remember that now and again

at the very end,

of some sheet billowing like a sail

there would be a flick,

like when your leg would twitch

while falling asleep on the carpet

in front of the TV set.

 

We would ride down mounds of black clay clods,

sharp as flint chipped into arrowheads

on your brother's Moped.

 

And we laid in a bucket

of a Caterpillar tractor,

cradled like baby rabbits

in nests made by their mothers,

tucked between the grass clippings,

 

strung into rows by the riding mowers

under the neglected

swing sets.

 

And we raised an architecture of bike ramps

built from plywood pulled from the building lots.

 

As each extension of the sewer line

cut squares out of the farmland,

clearing the prairies of their grasses and replacing them

with Bermuda and St Augustine

sprayed over the ground like paint.

 

Each day we would walk the creek as far as we could,

scratching bites until they’d bleed,

and we became Zacchaeus

trying to see Jesus

by climbing into a tree.

 

We’d sled like an avalanche

down the banks of the streams

to run like dogs off leashes

through the fields of sorghum

with the light spooled at the end of the horizon

and stretched into a pipe blowing the sun like it was glass

and where we would slip evening into our pockets

padded beneath the daybreaks sewn into our jackets

 as we smuggled our last hours past the checkpoints,

 always expecting this grace to end.

 

Yes, we held strands of Black Cats

as if they were serpents

like the Pharaoh's magicians

had conjured before Moses,

and we danced like Pentecostals

dropping them as they exploded,

burning the dirt by the mailboxes

just past the cattle guard,

black as the ashes

rubbed on our foreheads at Lent,

and marking our homes

as the Israelites did

to protect their children

in Egypt from the angel

of death.

 

We lit punks and stuck

them into anthills,

grinning like

Sheela na gigs.

 

 

Remember when we were kings,

the kings for a summertime

with that sky thrown open wide -

to all the emptiness above the clothesline,

when we inhaled our world

before going in for dinner

holding our breath all night

until we could be

together.