S

Summer

Summer Street

It was a city street,
Comfortably middle-aged without being rundown.
Not wealthy enough to have brick houses
But solid horizontal siding
Overlapped against Winter’s strength.
No one ever got a sliver from them.
Well cared for houses are well-behaved
And their edges are rounded with biennial layers
Of dignified color, with white trim.
Most were narrowed, single-familied, two-storied
Standing in mirrored pairs, flanking double driveways,
Pale grey, white, or the more daring beige.
There were a few older houses,
And a number of two-family flats
With long verandas both upstairs and down.
Back yards had just room enough for the clotheslines,
And, beyond the concrete, a row of Hollyhocks
Against the wall that hid the alley.
Front yards were only tiny squares of lawn
And at the curb, a strip too narrow for trees,
Sometimes both were cemented over.

This small world was bounded by the block.
But it was well-populated.
Not just by those too young to cross streets
Older kids hung around home base as well
And men, who went to work, returned
As grateful refugees.
No sidewalk was free of Hopscotch grids
During summer’s freedom from any school
Unless the pavement was broken.
By unwritten rule, houses with only driveway space
Used the boundary areas to make do.

Sometimes internecine warfare
With Aggie Warriors threatened
But in those days we didn’t have equal rights for boys,
They always had to make way for “ladies”
Ladies with mercurochromed knees from skating scrapes
Even small jeering ladies who too shameless advantage.

The Hollyhocks were infested periodically
With small children who came to watch bees
And listen to them buzz and bumble
In blossoms held shut by daring fingers.
They all ran screaming when it came time to let go.

Way down at the end of the block,
Almost to the park, but around the corner,
Lived old Grossvader Stein and his buxom Frau.
Their house was a few feet higher than the street
And sliding down the street
That minute square of ground provided in winter
Had been so popular, Papa Stein had cemented it over.
Though he puffed and roared over the Kinder
Using the six by six hill,
Summers called a truce to these tiny winter wars.
The Steins served root beer, home-brewed from real roots
Fragrant and foamy without carbonation.
Ice splintered off from a 25 pound block
Couldn’t dilute its pungency.

So the street had its population
And even visitors from other places
Alighting from car runningboards onto the curbing strips
Perhaps it still has
That happy population
But I don’t know
I haven’t been able to find it again.

Tags: poetry, S, Summer

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Poetry Dept.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.