Washington Street

On Washington Street
up the gray porch,
past the white door
with etched oval glass,
we dined in a room papered
with day-glo posters,
100 winking Ben Franklins
flipping the V in unity.

This night was before
you nailed that 7-Up butterfly
to the kitchen walls. Remember?
I opened your refrigerator door
to a bottle with a sock in it,
an onion plant and, inexplicably,
my purse, which was very cold.

Those are the 60s (or 70s) for you.
These damn years keep flying.
It was just one of those 20th-century
years that, like me, are washing off
with the tide, just years, just
one of those things.

My plan is to go down swingin
like Ma Rainey or Dylan Thomas
or even Sonny Liston, so I want you
to remember the night you sat
on the bed playing E major
and minor until I couldn't stand it
anymore. Leslie called and said
How are the dots where you are?
Marylynn said Doesn't lime soda
taste green?

and I understood them both
because those are whenever
those years were for you,
or, more precisely, for me.

Remember old Popovich upstairs
fighting the Battle of Hamburger Hill
alone or, more precisely,
with a bottle, saying Guns
don't kill people, wars do,
while downstairs
The Grateful Dead played
China Cat Sunflower?

Somebody has to remember
the burlap tapestry
holding three blue speckled
robin's eggs in a nest,
and the way your black hair
curled at your pale face,
and how you curled that night
around your guitar.