Cherry-Red MG

A Cherry-Red MG Roadster on Palmerston Sq, July, 2020

In the weeks after Savannah died,

I would see things 

in their new, unholy

light, stripped, as you do —

 

here’s one, Palmerston Square

in the magic excrescence 

the snow globe of glow that remains

of a sunless July evening,

I take the alley shortcut,

its mercenary efficiency

carving through the flanks of prim 

brick, northwest toward Bathurst.

 

All the old nameless alleyways

have signposts now

like department stores.

As with affairs, being named

they end soon after.

 

In the weeks after someone dies,

you think about them all the time

in the act of not thinking about them:

I’m not going to think about it, I think,

sharply intaking the filigree light, a scalpel —

it isn’t true, I think, clocking the 

cherry-red MG, casually resplendent, in the drive —

I’m not thinking about her —

young girl practising flute in the window — 

her then-ness or or her not-ness,

jangle of hoops, tattoos and dotted cotton,

a shed snakeskin 

her summer dress unmoored.

 

The young girl mouths her flute,

the notes wet the evening air.

 

Down the street, the knife-sharpener’s bell 

warbles, nearing. 

 

                                                            -Eva H.D.

AL: Note that our cherry-red MG roadster was parked in front of Friend Memorial Library, Brooklin, Maine. Photo by Henry Behrens