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SHOES FALLING OUT OF TREES
Next week’s check is
spent on last week’s rent.
If we had shoes, we’d walk away from here.
Tell it like it is, you said: This is where we want to be.
That was thirty-six years ago.
The air was music.
You never knew which tree was going to be next to dance.
Now, still trying to figure out why we left.
How far we’ve come.
One bicycle between us,
We lived high on the side of a rising mountain,
And the brakes were gone.
A single candy bar lasted a week,
A thin slice each day for each of us.
When we’re rich, Babe,
It’ll be orange juice for breakfast
Every single day—
A whole glass for you.
A whole glass for me.
Even then, we’ll share what we have.
At that altitude, you couldn’t bake.
The dough wouldn’t rise.
Robert found a guy living up in a tree
Who scribbled poems in a notebook
He found on the side of the road
Thumbing his way from Haight.
Read us a poem, we said. And he did.
Hail came down in the middle of an August afternoon.
The sun was no less confused then the rest of us.
You cut everyone’s hair near the river.
Thank you, they said.
Everything was free or wasn’t worth the trouble.
If we had any brains, Babe,
We’d go back up that mountain
Right this minute
And every year for a month, to remember.
Ah! That’s just talk. And I know it.
That mountain is gone.
Another one there in its place now, covered with money.
The guy who lived in a tree fell out long ago
Gone only God knows where.
Robert finally went back to England. Paul died.
We built a family together with our own hands.
We still have all our fingers.
We have become that mountain.
Neither one of us will need another pair of shoes
For as long as we can remember.
Allen Brafman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He and his wife
have five children and eight grandchildren. Occasionally his work
appears in small journals. Book publications include Brooklyn 2002, a
collaboration with the photographer Harry Tarzian and Sonnets from the
Yiddish, published by Elephantine Press. Stone Feathers is scheduled for
publication early next year.
—Writing
is how I figure things out. Sometimes I figure things out better than
other times. It follows that some writing is better than others. When I
stop trying to figure things out, which is to say, when I stop writing,
altogether, I will probably stop breathing. I am in no hurry to stop
writing. |