Picaroon Poetry - Issue #17 - July 2019

Tobi Alfier
Unfinished Portrait
She’s stumbled over love’s disputed borderlands in many weathers. The burnt air
of August finds her just as compass-in-hand wandering as the itinerant fall wind—
cloud shadows a checkerboard of pattern on low hills, tops coated with sugarsnow,
the air waiting, workmen and vagrants waiting, tinge of clay and dried mud
up against curbs, reminder of rains that came, ground-thirst slugging down water
like she used to shoot tequila. Now it’s a calmly sipped shot of anything gold, in
anywhere quiet, mirrors against the back bar reflect her carefully painted face, hair
brushed a thousand strokes, age impossible to guess, and it’s another late
afternoon in the rugged splendor of somewhere-ville. Windmills stand tall and
graceful, lining the valley. Sound of the Union Pacific on its way, a distant lullaby,
reminder of a long-ago trip from Texas to California, bunk beds to sleep on, birds
and brush waving goodbye through the window as it rushes and rushes, stopping
in towns along the way that she doesn’t remember. Time—like footsteps
dispatched in an alley, the downgoing sun. Shale tones of sky ease around
memory no one but she wants to revisit. The early fade of day.
47