And
Kansas She Says Is the Name of the Star
There's nothing GREEN out here
was her initial reaction to the bonafide
In Cold Blood territory beaten by the weather
into which she got dropped at the age of eleven
and that firstblush opinion was never to change
Her window there looked north-
westward over spaces cracked inanely wideopen
under lusterless leveledoff skies of thin gaunt taupe
and swept ever flatter by the screendoorbanging winds
but she found that flattery would get her nowhere
When gazing nightly out
this window in its accustomed frame of Why O Why
her feelings tinged a hueful blue with daring seadreams
bringing salty artificial glitter to her eyes
while looking through the glass for a wishupon star
She runs along away
taking the classical bandanna-at-stickend tack
holding (as they say) onto her breath and heart and hope
and plunging uppishly into what seems like The Woods:
a fernacious dense mossedover forest of rain
Where the air about her
is flush with the spirited touch of aqua vitae
nearforgotten amid the unsmiling sepia
of her tumbleweedlike troubles: here they melt away
as lemondrops and oncedoused witches do in song
Coming out of the dark
she finds herself in a ne plus ultra sort of
place
a lofty Herculean Pillar from whose top can
be seen a sea of trees in living verdacolor
for wave upon chlorophyll-run-rioting wave
And as she emerges
so too does daylight leave overhead cloudbanks behind:
in sunnybreak roadform it slants over and beyond
the iridescence to a city said to be made
of emeralds; and O what happened then was rich—
Copyright © 1989, 2005 by P. S. Ehrlich