Four

*kinnu*

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Four
– to Boo

I can remember four
all because of two nights.
Mother and Father moved
into a Spanish house
that year. We came loosely
bundled after midnight,
down the alkaline road
south, so long, so fiery.
Big Eva, Dutch nanny,
read icy tales from Grimm
till the indigo sky
went black in the high car
window ... motoring dreams.
Two pillow-minded drunks,
my sister and I reeled
through echoing cool rooms
to fall in shadowy beds.

It was a run-hide house
with a pomegranate tree
in the old court below
where the wind never came.
Within a week, the red
below my room (that no-
red-like-it red) took me,
with its tart seeds, fast friends
so that afterward when
the circus stopped outside
and I could not come down,
having been bad that day,
but high over the court
watched them in their costumes,
after supper singing
out through the tall rose gate,
up the around-town hill,
the pomegranate tree was
bleeding in the dusk,
redder than the clown's mouth
and redder than Rose Red.
 
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