Late sunlight through the slats in the sky—
The silver spray of birthday party water guns
Of three Russian families, in a barbeque breeze,
Their long laughing lines of lusty B’s and hilarious Y’s.
Their children look like royalty.
A squirrel stares, a ball of speckled clover in his mouth,
With eyes on the side of his head, he vibrates his
Translucent quill of a tail as large as the rest of him
And clings on all fours to tree bark like a giraffe’s skin,
Then moves up the trunk in exponential bursts.
We drink from honeysuckle strings,
Five tiny fingers curled like violin f’s
On a little golden maid.
Drawn like bees to a flower scent,
The Russian children come at the sound of laughter
To the tilt-a-whirl, maniacally laughing themselves
Before they fall off, faces in the beige imported sand
As parents sound angry Russian K’s and T’s,
And they get back on, want it faster,
Their sneaker footprints like cave petroglyphs.
A slate parka lies in a rivulet of dry oak leaves.
The birds sing along with the swingset.
Kids, like shamans, spread sand on the slide
And are forever climbing up its metal tongue
To fall back to a plume of dust.
The warts and veins of tree roots
Twist between steel trash drums
Of multi-colored rust.
Out comes the watermelon
Split red by rainbow steel.
