Undoing
The storm burst with summer heat that had been building since noon.
Perched in the treehouse with glass windows high in an ancient
oak, I felt little fear. The only light came in through wavy rain beating
against the panes, placed by the farm’s previous owner, a father
more doting than the ones you and I could claim. The other children
had raced up the hill in time to wait it out in the main house, staining
their tongues day-glo with bright popsicles, riding out the storm
in the cool basement gloom. It was the first time we were alone.
Your shoes scratched across the plywood floor. I looked down at the
dirt on my own shins and feet, skin brown from playing hours and hours
in summer fields. You touched me with no trepidation, fingertips so light
with sweetness, I came to you as fearlessly as the calf whose leg had snapped
in Sully’s field, whose mother had left it for dead. Somehow she knew you
would help her. Somehow I knew the same was true for me. I tasted
your scent when you kissed me, holding on in grey fragmented
light like this was the last moment it would ever come so easily
to either of us, that it would end with the sudden force
of the rain as quickly as it had begun.
by Laura Levesque
from Autumn Sky Poetry Number 18, July 2010
Photo by Christine Klocek-Lim
Leave a Reply