"Poem"

I remember once, when you were ahead of me walking through the main square, after you had dropped a scoop of ice cream, pistachio it should have been, onto the solid black coffee stone sitting at the bottom of that porcelain thimble and had sat there sipping, taken out of space and time, your face like a child seen hiding the secret mirth of a stolen cookie; and you had already postulated to the air (i just so happened to hear) that you feared the seagulls would impale us on their beaks (those bags of flying pools genetically shallow; don't worry i said they are just jealous) and we already tried to lounge languidly on those large concrete jackstones that some giant tumbled into the sea but I feigned cool because you weren't looking; it was then, passed the port where the fish were gutted and the squid were peeled and the manta rays were wacked against the undulating concrete punished for some crime unknown, their thousand eyes bulging and lifeless; it was as we walked back with the sun at our backs back through the square heavy with milling people and with beggars parading their wizened palms and broken backs, there that the smile set from your magnetic countenance that beguiles those lost planets orbiting the uncharted star. I remember once, when the smile set, that I was lost suddenly in the unknown sea, calm and deep, a sky of a sea, with neither stars nor sense to guide me and I threw these tired hands soaked with salt and rubbed raw with the sands of one too many dunes, sent them as a weed pushes from the earth to rotten air, sent them without sending them and you saw, because you looked at me, your tender eyes flying into mine like two seagulls big and brown with glistening heads and sharpened beaks and I saw the shadow of a smile shimmer, a time of long ago echoed in the present, felt but not touched, heard but not listened to. I remember, when that smile set, the last yawn of the morning.

Hildebrandt Trumble