THE MARVELOUS FLOATING BOOKSHOP AND
VIRTUAL ICE CREAM EMPORIUM
[to my sister Sharon re our childhood
dream of founding a bookstore/ice cream parlour/toyshop, couldn't fit the toys
in, sorry
but you know I tried]
the poem with the caramel icing
turned out right
though no one knew about it
and nobody ever saw
the Marvelous Floating Bookshop and
Virtual
Ice Cream Emporium on Earth
(except perhaps, me)
though I promise, it was there
painted cherry vanilla
on the little lilac lane that
only came into view
on the left hand side of the bus
when I was the only one looking out
in that direction.
and you dropped the day in your
merriment
melting like a creamsicle on the hot
enough
out here to fry an egg sidewalk
where who could ever tell them from
the flowers,
night children petaling in a garden-
thick in the shade
of lime trees, that's how I dreamed
it, all summer and dusk
and lavender blue at midnight
every blade of grass bent toward us
as we wandered into the strawberry
frothy feeling of
the Marvelous Floating Bookshop and
Virtual Ice Cream Emporium:
four paperbacks, 25 cents each
wrapped in brown paper tied with a
string
and no string theory and just for you
or me
entranced in our summer reading and
wearing
seersucker striped dresses in
different colours
and taking our ease with some treat
lusciously malted through and
through and
I'll have a cherry phosphate stylish
Rose said
in a book we both read
crackling new
with a papery perfume
like a box of penny valentines just
opened
and every heart
for you at the singular page
only you will decipher
still and still and still
you wander or you will among tinted
illustrations0
comic book classics their
fragrance brand new
toward the drugstore racks in dreams
that squeak
when you turnstile turn them:
content is a fizzing fountain coke
with one magic scoop
of vanilla
and mysterious odes of poets never
heard from on earth
we discover in an afterlife of creamsicles.
mary angela douglas 8 july 2013;18 may
2024
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