did not know the scar was a charm grafted to the sole of his foot:
he did not die.
In time he met the mascara-faced man
and the woman with the tattooed smile.
He sampled war,
his day brightened with the first snow,
his scar changed color with the thaw,
but he could not understand its purple and green,
its red to yellow,the fold of skin at his heel,
the fractures of bent toes and injured toenail.
When he took his first lover, everything saddened within him
and when she left him months later,he cried night after night.
Only the first snow in the year of the child soldier
pulled him away,and he went on living,
one century changing to another.
He fell in love with sad-faced clowns,
had many bad luck children,
never ceased at the wonder of first snow,
and the river changed course twice in his lifetime,
the bottom of his foot able to find every rock to cross,
every foothold to keep from drowning:The wisdom of his foot,
the markings of eyeliner and dark rouge,
the long lines he recited and the short ones he wrote down,
the way a smile is a frown:
The prophecy of birthright did not come to pass.
| Copyright © 2021 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively. |
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