We wore shorts with stains the color
of the popsicles we’d eaten,
sitting on the cross-timber fence.
Careless blobs on khaki canvas,
turning sticky black in the sun,
sticky fingers looking for a clean place
to wipe.
Patches still sprouted in the backyard,
dark green teepees of grass
where Clyde, our recently disappeared
basset hound, whose claim
on a meaningful life
was leavening the garage-side lawn,
in the shadiest spots
with raw material
for dark green teepees.
And so he is gone.
The emerald pyramids
in the shade of the willow
testify to his destiny reached.
The leaning garage
was not leaning so much as
to be threatening,
but enough that you noticed it
and walked around the back
to see if it leaned
in both directions
or just toward the front.
Both.
And crumbling some at the corner
of the concrete pad.
Irony is not the word
that describes the mystery
of why gravel, meant for the ground,
so visibly urges a scoop, a heft,
a swing of the elbow,
a glance around
to find
a target.
Even now, so many years later,
I can’t think of the word
that enters the mind of a boy
standing in the driveway
with a handful of gravel
looking at the new family car
in the leaning garage.
A Buick LeSabre, two years old,
twenty thousand miles–the sweet spot
where the value has dropped
but the newness is almost
fully intact.
Perfect condition, washed
and prepped by Bob Johnson himself.
He usually had his dealership boys do it,
but for a friend he did it himself.
Spread out,
it looked like more dust than rock.
The sound of it hitting the trunk lid
was more rock than dust.
Or perhaps that the rock was more
significant
than the dust.
Significant now,
not one second ago
when the cool gravel tickled
to go up and away, anywhere,
anywhere in the yard,
the alley, the driveway;
anywhere but back down to the ground
where, not ironically,
it belonged.
Instant regret could not
put the gravel in the yard,
the alley, the driveway,
back down to the ground.
Wildly brushing the rocks and dust
across the shining, fresh-waxed,
proud new purchase
cut scratches even deeper,
more profuse,
and permanent.
No emerald green pyramid
grew to mark my impulse,
my early claim on a meaningful life.
But my destiny was set out
to be reached.