Summer’s Prairie Children

Bill Hoagland | Poetry

Horizon blurs like a week of dreams.

One by one, blue streetlights bloom

under alien aluminum poles,

brick buildings shimmer,
still warm from day,
and sky glows long past curfew.

Kids turning onto Main Street miss

sunset’s pinks and reds playing catch

on the undersides of cirrostratus.

On the corner of Fifth and Main

summer’s prairie children, almost grown,

pause for the light to change,

crane, scanning traffic

for the cops, tip bottles

to their lips and wince.

I smell perfume and beer and smoke,

calling up my first escapes:
my slow, black, 1950 Plymouth DeLuxe,

a red interior and a silver radio
that sang to me alone, I thought,

blood-sad, blood-mad, blood-happy,

the beat of six pistons popping
through shifts down First Avenue
or idling at the light above the overpass

where I adjust the rearview mirror

with a flourish, late sunsets
just right in two times now.