A Morning Poem

This poem starts with a line from Ray Bradbury's book Dandelion Wine. A book Valerie recommended to me as the perfect summer book. I now agree. The line struck me though and I wanted to use it somehow. And I wanted to capture the feeling of the book, this dreamy foreverness, within the poem. This is what came of it.

No Caterpillars

The next morning was a morning of no caterpillars.
And so no cloud sun cloud.
Just a stretch of bottomless sky.

No one bit into a fruit they didn’t want to finish,
no coffee cups left on the roofs of cars,
no egg shells in pans.
There was not a morning confrontation we rehearsed all day,
there was no reason and no confrontation.
No kittens asleep on cooling engines.
A morning of nothing untoward.

The morning a sister found a lost sister.
The air felt like a cold Coke in the throat,
and the infomercials seemed full of people wanting to better your life.
Clichés sounded clever again,
and no house looked bigger than any other house.

Every bird that died, did so in the air, like they wanted to.
A home where no one was home disappeared into a sinkhole,
like a magic trick, like reclamation.
A gravedigger took the morning off for someone to dig his plot.

It was a morning of really satisfying yawns, and tapioca,
if you wanted it.
A morning of Good Mornings and a morning of sympathetic looks.
A morning of no static, no ants in the sugar, no locked keys.
Not a morning of searching for the right words, instead
reciprocate, waffling, and value proposition arrive like a train on time.

The next morning we don’t think of WMDs or calories.
Even hangovers seem light and bearable.
This morning was a morning everyone remembered dreams,
and we told them to each other like bed time stories,
and dwelt all day on them like a past life recurring to us.

And the morning after the next morning was caterpillars again.