Robert Verdon, #319, Street

not a street

torn off the past and discarded,

fluttering down time’s highway like

a drunken butterfly, but a moist cloud

gloving the green hill of hope at sixty-two;

scampering up and down it, barely out of breath now,

fancying cirrus pencilled on the eyebrows of the paper proscenium

or a polygon of smog angled like a rocket

made of matter so dense a bead of it would sink a well,

lost in reading,

as the world turns sour

then yellow like sour cream,

or old newspapers in a musty library

from which you emerge, as from a cinema at noon,

realising again that cross-dressing trees line the boulevard

each Spring,

onto a street along the foot of a mountain military with trees

looming, olive as doom.