Just A Summer Poem

Battle ship metal-grays, navy blues would be
no more. A black fifties Chevy coup hand painted
with a 6-inch brush would be his pentimento
for the sins of the war. Two-tone, two-tone
he would murmur and there right in our front yard...
A birthing place for the “Bumble-Bee” bright
cab-yellow top with a black-bottom. A song to be sung.
Ragging his stained hands with turpentine, a Lucky-Strike
ash curled to the tips of his lips
he would lean on the horn of that car until there was
A pig-pile of every neighborhood kid.

Older ones thigh to thigh in the back seat
with hands entwined around the birdlike
bellies of those younger sitting in their laps.
Truants on the back floor of the car would flip
a coin to designate the jockey of that mystical
camel’s hump. Now – we were ready
for a spirited trip to “Scaa-boro” beach.

Freckled and auburn-haired meant numerous trips
for me to the First Aid station where I was covered
with a veneer of a mummified salve that attracted
the convulsed howls of boys I thought
would be my tormentors forever.

Games of connecting the dots and guessing
the correct number of new spots
Would be their past-time... until some saucy tanned beauty
would amble by with a look of maybe?
“Damn fools,” another knowing soliloquy from Poppy.
We were the savvy ones – he the simpleton.
Pursue the groove, leave the grit behind.
And yet all this would bring softness
to his face that would hold forever.