Valerie Owen
There is a Heat Haze. Tomorrow Will be Another Beautiful Day.
I notice them as I walk the city,
Old ladies down tube holes,
Sleeping on steps: grey as child thumbed bread.
They wear slashed plimsoles, buskined with string.
They smell like one of those old horses
Forgotten in fields. Slack, sprouty, muzzle skin
Round their mouths too. Mouths jerky, like babies feeling sex.
They tick on like my broken watch,
But like it don’t connect.
Observe waking, their hands pick and twitch.
One regards a piece of newsprint, lifts a skirt,
Tears off a strip of petticoat, like a curator,
holds it against the sun,
Which blazes through it as through rose quartz.
They are street custodians,
They conserve the treasure of the streets,
Their ridged black edged finger nails
Hold the trash landscape of gum burning pearls on asphalt,
Maddened dogs tea-drenching hot concrete,
Worrying us among bright green glass bottles
And dessicated brown moth specimens of condoms.
Round their tree girth
A torque twisted white wax piece of pure harsh string.
What talisman is this?
What does it conserve?
Involuntarily,
I fleetingly,
Feel the vase of myself.
Page(s) 101
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