growing

From crisp summered perfume of dew coming in the screened door

on the early morning breeze and coffee, and scrambled eggs, and
strawberry freezer jam on grandma's warm biscuits and

marijuana plants growing tall outside the window, behind
the bearded iris and behind the rainbow of gladiolas and
before the sunflowers, with their sunshinepie faces trembling down
on us, banks of flowers with secrets, and

a fort under the skirt of the Japanese maple where we could read
about Betty and Veronica in the shade and occasionally glance
through the weepfall branches at the strange people

who were our relatives wondering at the figs fattening on a branch, and
plucking sprigs of basil from great green pillows of it, and
plucking raspberries from the vine, and sucking whole eggs in and out
of the slender necks of liter bottles to amuse the children,

and the scandal of the aunts who didn't wear bras under their t-shirts, and
Mount Rainier was in the background, and the sky was
the clearest bright blue of all of our eyes, to afternoons with

prostitutes appearing from beside scarlet rhododendron hedges 
on the side of the road, cars weaving through the rain and
slowly near and stopping, red lights flashing quick and then white and
disappearing again and we didn't understand where they went,

what they did, who they were, and then you.  That crystalline
night I pushed your car over the ice to the nearest service station and
advised you call the police for help,

stupid youth, stupid me, with those tracks up your beige arms
and I took you from under the stars to the hospital instead and
I held your hand, and they lanced your abscess, and I fainted

stupid youth, stupid me,
dizzy from the bright florescent light and
the stench of this life,

Pinesol saturated the air and
nothing was clean anymore, anyway.