Suburban Aubade with French Horn
                The demons don't like fresh air. What they like best is if you stay
                in bed with cold feet. ~ Ingmar Bergman

This morning more leafblower than birdsong. Autumn chills
stained glass leaves, fissures orange where summer used to live.
My body carries me over cement trails, breaks through tethers
of glistening web, first down the street. The neighbor's yard

punctuated with foil, gauze, playing cards—curiosities stuck in dry
knee-high weeds. An arm of Bermuda grass, suburban kelp, catches
my laces, tries to pull me down into its resentful sea. As a teen, her
parents made her mow the blighted patch where lawn used to be.

A few houses down, the garage door of the quiet blue house is open.
The wife sculpts her juniper tams as though they are giant bonsai,
each cut precise, unerring—a week of mornings to shape the hedges
into great waves. She disappears before 9AM. I don't know her name.

I round the corner toward the elementary school my children
have outgrown. Car lines narrow the street; all the parents bow
to phones. One child's science project has lost its cell membrane
in the boxwood. There isn't enough time to create a second skin.

Side-stepping puddles of goldenrain lanterns, I hear Brahms' "Horn Trio"
playing from an open window. Notes ricochet off the freeway's barrier
wall, trapeze through the air. When I was small, my mother taught
me about the French horn. Her dawns now an hourglass of yesterdays.

Despite the drought, some lawns mushroom with death caps, enough
to poison the entire block: Goodbye, sex offenders! So long, neighbors
who leave their howling dog outside all night! Farewell, fans of insomniac
home improvement! Sweat darkens my underwire.

Back home, from my kitchen window the hills look blue
in the arms of an old moon. I baptize eggs for breakfast—
already morning detaches,
                                                    floats toward night's throat.

Tweet

Copyright © 2022 Kelly Cressio-Moeller All rights reserved
from Shade of Blue Trees
Two Sylvias Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission