Golden State

by John Kruschke

Dazzling synthetic threads of tangerine orange itched
me happy when I was eight years old, my favorite plaid
shirt, weft with runs of vibrant red and yellow.
Rough florescent fabric beaming brilliant orange as

marigold flowers in front of my sister’s elementary school,
named: Marigold Elementary, next to Pleasant Valley High.
Marigolds by any other name would smell as ochre,
yet they flaunted pollen-heavy petticoats under

orange bosomed trees my father grew backyard.
Thorny green-leafed branches flashing orbs of orange
skins we peeled away to tongue the sweet segmented
fruits as orange the fields of California golden

poppies on Sierra foothills at the edge of
town if springtime rains would grace the ground transform the
dirt-dry taupe-straw grass to dappled orange gauze:
draping waves of paint daubes on the hills.

At university, long afternoons I’d gaze
from Panoramic Way across the burgeoning bay
to the Golden Gate Bridge spanning sunglint waves
beneath a saffron sunset – which felt very romantic.

There I gave a girl a golden band, slid
despite her eternally seeing red. She insisted
her infernos cleared unhealthy underbrush
but in truth they only burned the greenwood black.

On a honeymoon trip to a coastal forest we puzzled at trees with
bizarrely crenulated ashen bark, solved when slanting
sunlight erupted a rapture of myriad Monarch butterflies,
tornado-thousand poppy petals sublimating sky.

I’d seen orange in trees before: father doubtful
driving our sedan through raging forest fire,
fulminating furies flaying flesh from off the trees on
both sides of the highway with no end in sight.

Long further down that road, though I nearly perished
in the flames, I repossessed the gold ring from
the arsonist girl in the home she set ablaze. The golden
bridge is sunken far below the western waves,

the orange-thread shirt is shed like an abandoned chrysalis.
Yet here the winging monarch flies unbidden into
mind, every orange flutter a flashbulb memory
migrating away, suspending me in a golden state.