Page 20 - Contrast1975

18

ONCE FRIENDS FOUR POEMS

son DRINK DAYS

Old friends once came

Sparkling fresh, sweet and trite,

Chasing the syruped, butter-smooth summer
While the sunsets dripped like ice cream
Down this wooden, splintered earth.
We licked that sky until the darkness
Swam in our bellies, you and I.
Then we'd catch the tangerine sun as
It bounced and peeled off the corners
Of the day, just like Curb-ball games

We championed on the knee-paved stones
Of Greenleaf Way.

Good Humor, Good Humor
We cried, as our daddies

Wheezed nickels through the nose.
Eclairs and soda, salt to sugar,

How we drank and drowned in those days.
Always another, when one was gone.
Such squashable, aluminum lives
Sealing Our flip-top hearts.
How could we know that

Open but empty, the cans could cut.

-nancy k. barry

IN STOCKS

Old friends come like tickertape now.
HellohelIohelIohelIohelIohelIohelIo.
Spinning their threaded days past
My memory graphs, that peak forever,
Just before falling for life.
Their printouts reeling onward, it is
No matter Who, What, Why, Where, When,
All they know is Once.

I watch and clutch and calculate this
Life that was, wanting more than strips of
Black-on-white figures: "She was married on
August 12; He died at Narn in 70; She has 2 babies now
Wrapped tight by these shreaded lives
I Weave my memory shroud round and round,
DKreoeppintgo tswtriasitgehdt rtuhien. lives once loved, before they

GOOdbyegOOdbyegOOdbyegOOdbyegOOdbyegOOdbye.
Reduced to holes on paper now,
Two hollow lives sandwiched between the
Roots of earth and lines of sky: always there were
Boundaries, telling us: Grow smaller.
You'll have to thread the machine someday.

+-nancy k. barry