Sorrel-Red Saturdays

SORREL-RED SATURDAYS
February 19, 2005


I walk around in this beaut weather
thinking how I remember when Saturdays
were sorrel-red. They were sixteen hands
tall, full of the devil, and something unknown.
Now they are like the dead things from far
away that only roll over in propinquity.
They lay under cold stone and beneath
glacier rocks that sit upon bluffs with the sun
on their shoulders and shade at their feet.
They grow along the roots of trees and take loose
apples for lunch as they spoil in the grass and
fester in the palm of Autumn.

These were the days that shimmered in running
water, took fright at movement in the corner of
the eye and trembled before cranes that towered
overhead like gremlins. They came with gravel streets
and frantic geese
and yappers who broke the peace
then flung their bottoms to the ground so they could
lift a hind leg to scratch behind a floppy ear. They
cringed between bumpers and ambushed from
flowers while the static played on a window sill
and cages squawked and threw parrot feathers
out to freedom. They were the days lost in mud and
flattened by ice and overthrown by balance.

Now the ballparks are free of frolic and warm
leather and hanging buck-stitching where heels
battled for weight, and the trails are only paths
of winding dirt that lead nowhere. Here there
are no seasons. No blistering mornings or leaf-pushing
winds or kibbled litter on opal ground. The fields
lay barren before the camera of my mind and the
tables are empty of elbows and the benches are free
of mounters and the long gramineous stretch is free of
rolling croups and red legs scrambling
against the sky to race the clouds.

Perhaps Saturdays are still sorrel-red, somewhere.