Pleasant Valley Sunday
She’s a breeze beyond my white fence
pastel-colored kite tailing behind,
a blur of pinks & peaches & as she & her mom pass:
we wave like neighbors
who don’t know each other’s names.
This little girl is six, maybe seven, transfixed
by the relationship of kite to cloud to ground.
I’m plopped in a brown Adirondack chair drinking
Portuguese red, breathing dense subdivision air as old
songs stream from my iPad. I think about my kids.
They go to good schools. I’m proud of my credit score & every mailbox
in this community is painted white.
I look up at a sky so clear I think I see two skies.
I hear a shriek & see the kite strangling a banyan.
Charcoal burning everywhere, a refrain from a Monkees song
I loved when I was this child’s age plays.
They always say those were simpler times. Were they?
My glass is empty & an EMS siren blares over my music.
Cocooned in this suburban balloon here in status symbol land,
I’m borne on charcoal gusts like the little girl’s kite drags
against gravity, never knowing where I’ll tangle where I’ll fall.
I need to trim the hedges, but that thankless task can wait.
David Colodney is a poet living in Boynton Beach, Florida. He is author of the chapbook, Mimeograph, and his poetry has or will appear in journals including rust + moth, South Carolina Review, and Door = Jar. A two-time Pushcart nominee, David has written for the Miami Herald and the Tampa Tribune and currently serves as an associate editor of South Florida Poetry Journal.