These Hazy Days

Oh, Memory Lane

You walk through a neighborhood
similar to yours.
You see a familiar waving eucalyptus a block off
and hear the ragtag scuffle
of nosy dogs moving behind their fences.
Soon you sidestep a small ant highway
and pause to tie your shoe.

The Fourth of July is  around the bend;
black flies wing like tiny airplanes
over the mountainous folds of euphorbia,
purring with the thought
of approaching barbecue.

You stand and pass a sunbleached swingset,
and the tacky plastic plaything
bends a strange chord inside you.
At once you think of your grandma's house,
of her green bean casserole that you never liked.
You remember laughing with your cousins,
crushing crackers in your hands,
playing round after round
of restrictionless Wiffleball.

You remember, too, picking blackberries
with your grandmother
along her alley's chainlink fence.
The fruit was always dusty, like
gravel and grit in your teeth
but you loved it anyway.

You think of the tire swing
in her backyard, and when you recall
your spins in it, you still get that same sick
feeling in your stomach
but you don't hate it.
These days you're rather indifferent
To feeling sick.

You think of more now as you walk
further down the cracking street,
straddled by the roots of Norway maples
and littered with pamphlets from irrelevant years.
You kneel and peer and draw back the curtains,
searching under the stones for red wigglers--

And you can smell your grandma's
laundry detergent, you can hear the clap
of Hungry Hungry Hippos  tournaments, you
feel the weight of baked beans in tortillas
on your tongue--
you can even hear your best friend's
frightened whimpers that escaped her mouth
when your pretendings became all too
sinister and real.

You keep walking through the neighborhood,
almost blind with memories, until at last
something stops you and you see it--
here at last, the sidewalk ends
and there are no more roads to cross.