Oak Morse

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Rendezvous Unblued

the homeless shelter didn’t impale a hole in me — even at eight —
it was only lemon-spiked temporary ecology.

Mama there taught me how
to fold the sanctity of lies untold,

but an aunt who resided in Atlanta
hocus-pocus’d panorama glory in me,

brought me roller blades — a sage for good
grades & resistance amid vagabond.

So I rolled.
Like a color spinner around a crooked-neck mailbox,

fire ants aircraft’ing out of rocks — rolled —
busted Budweiser gold jamming up the street.

Swiveled beyond it, like I did with poison oak
that weighed me down, hands and arms

a lumpy scarlet bow from backwoods parliament
stretched-out fence with other little penniless housemates

who I was reverent to call family too —
a translucent host of germy —

but I already had an auntie
gazing at me rolling, stage-space of a derelict park

in between a broken swing — those two chains
dangling from heaven — I rolled,

four-leaf invisible hold to the high
point edge of the hill,

where Mama Newported with the white folks,
shot a baby bird to the bushel

where I had to hand-pick my own switches —
o’ these rollerblades are their own rosemary missile,

like a boy too shroomed to stop
to hear that bloody-collapsed table humming

for refuge alongside the road.
So I rolled along that old station wagon

crying off its color,
swooshed past the peering sewers

where I pleaded they were hidden Taj Mahals
with cherubs of glinting George Washington greens —

but nothing comparable to my kite regimen,
even if the alleys unblued and unblackened,

and I woke wrapped in a bunk
in my own pristine shack

Mama paid and prayed for.
These rollerblades didn’t have quite the time to revel that —

yea, my aunt brought that,
a rendezvous so marvel, so new

that a woman living worlds away even brewed.

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Banner Art:
Marsden Hartley, Movement, 1913, Art Institute of Chicago