Shotgun Blossoming
Caught me off guard; the poem continued, but as it was only one of several hundred that would follow, I read it and crossed it off my syllabus moving on to the next title.
However, those two words have never really left me. It's weird. Sometimes I'll be driving and I'll see a row of blossoms, and I'm transported back to that page, on the left hand side of the book, second poem down,
Shotgun Blossoming.
How peculiar. I wonder how she thought of that? I would never think of a shotgun blossoming! The implications.. ... the questions.. what does it mean? I love the way it still captures my attention. The way the words are naturally drawn out. The art of language is the art of sound.
My words have wooden beams and dusty chicken feathers floating down. Rays of light.
Sweaty foreheads.
Rollercoasters.
On the adjacent lot to my cousin’s small apartment was a large empty house. It was one out of the three homes which occupied the surrounding five miles of land. The side lawn had a rusty slide and an old oak beside it. The tree had a swing. For the most part, my brother and myself grew up with our cousins, so they were very much like our brothers and sisters.
Due to a miscommunication clarified decades later, for days at a time, I was in charge. I was seven and had an assistant who was five. The rest of our playmates were three, three and a half, and four. This meant I made up the rules. This meant I needed an assistant who could see beyond playing the part of the jaguar or the babies in our games. The three year olds wanted to be protected, and the four year old wanted to growl. As The Leader and The Assistant we’d instruct them on where to play and wait until we had something conjured up for lunch, or a snack, or a bandaid. Lunch was usually graham cracker and peanut butter sandwiches, with a small side of chocolate milk because we are almost out of milk. After lunch, we would do one of several forbidden activities. We would either: Walk the half mile to tell stories or race twigs on the small bridge over the creek; climb a commercially sized agricultural supply of hay bales housed under one dark roof; climb the wooden tow cart and pretend we were caught in a powerful storm at sea; or most forbidden of all… climb in through the window the house next door. It would appear we did a lot of climbing.
Once inside, we sometimes played Freddy Kruger movie scenes there…. which, in this particular memory, is exactly what we did.
That night, as with all nights, the silence was so consuming we could clearly hear the toilet running next door while warm in our beds. We went outside to listen to more carefully, just to confirm it wasn’t a ghost crying . The five of us went outside into the dusty summer heat that cries for another shower, and laid our hands on the back of the cats sleeping in the flowerboxes beneath the windows.
They slept under our lulls.
The blinding night extended all the way to my nose and no further, as the light from the house kept it at bay for one moment more. Shapes moved in the distance. Coyotes perhaps, or wild dogs. We stood on the step in front of the door, ready to run for any reason. The flowers were blooming, the night warm and scattered with dangling diamonds of fire.
I swear this time in my life formed so many of my peculiars.
Spiced Wood
Drenched Roses
Sheets outside the window
Infinity disappears down
a dirt road.
This was my seventh year.
How very different the world is now. A child recently asked me what I thought progress was, and I thought back to that night, and the inarticulated treasures I had been given in the hours of play. Whatever the real world was at the time, we were not in it! But that's the beauty of children I think, that they can play out a bit of heaven here, and practice in their games, caring for each other, saving one another from harm, or loving the lost and angry character who washed ashore many years ago in a terrible storm at sea, with all their hearts; until they come to trust in others again. Children can group together and protect each other, and we can only hope, the bit of heaven they taste in their youth, carries on into their adult lives. With that being said, if one night, you hear children laughing outside, and it's nearly three am, it may just be my childhood seeking me out.
