Accidentals

Of Eloise, the tall, sweet breasted one, 
now polished off between sleek Buick 
and rusty Pontiac on the giraffe spotted 
avenue, this is a song and a memory. 
She clutched our heart and senses when 
she was molested by death, but that is not 
what the cops will tell you once they have 
buttoned securely their respectable pants. 

The giraffe street grew delirious, even 
monkey-like with shrieks. And so it craned 
its disturbing neck through office windows, 
transoms, over water coolers, even aslant 
the maple desks and between the legs of bosses, 
to ask for pity, judgment, anger, fear or mercy, 
all the fodder life demands when the day 
goes somersaulting into awkward felonies. 

But the fat-girdled cops come to say: 
"It is well, it is well, hold your goldarned 
peace, the things she clutched were not your 
heart, nor anything nice. Just a purse stuffed 
with the mangled contrabands of love. Keep your 
kidneys dry. Look, it was Griffin's Shoewhite 
she had on her shoes; what more can you ask 
from anyone in the springtime of the year?" 

But my thoughts, dissembling about me and her, 
are gathered by the creek now tunneled underneath 
the street; they speak in an old boyhood patois 
about the accident, mentioning blood and garters, 
but also little animal hooves on the shore of that 
forgotten creek, where the little banjo-eyed 
ones came to slake their thirst and innocence. 
Those cry: Once you didn't need this pity or guilt. 

Then returns the sunprancing day to ask: Yes what 
of Eloise painted with pigments of blood upon 
the giraffe street? Or did she clutch only a purse, 
and you the wrong accident for your penitence?