The Fall I Remember
By George L. Chieffet

At sixteen she wrapped honey suckle vines around me
and whispered my name;
Oh, the pine boughs shed sticky amber
jewels; trees peeled their bark and sighed
over the dinged fenders of my jalopy car.

The Olympian fall came later
when I am quarantined by scrub pine
and calamine ;
my body becoming a white moat
while across her tush erupted an Aleutian archipelago.
Sure there were things I wanted to say:
she had white teeth and raven eyes;
straight black hair rushed into vines;
she was a flower stem mistaken for a girl;
she had pink gums.
At night I itched; the black bees were boring out of their hive
porch wind moaned through my curly hairs
like harp strings they plucked
an idiot love chorus.

The real story is I never touched her. I spoke to her just once
on a dirt road in Dix Hills New York
fall 1962 on the number four bus.
I opened my mouth; her lidded eyes stared at my tongue
flapping or rather pointing like a wet arrow head
to where she sat compressed in her seat
though I’m sure she was somewhere else
big-eyed or not, looking somewhere else
she bit my fly
enough to bring blood;
the red I remember was scarlet.

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