Sylvia Likens Admired in Long Beach
(April, 1965)

The boys don’t wish all girls could be California girls—
they just wish all California girls could be her:

long legged, hips zipped in denim,
a rocking harmonica sway.  She’s the new girl from Indy,

the carnival man’s daughter; they envy
her boyfriend, who once, at a party, took her

upstairs, under a blanket, where he only held her,
felt her supple ribcage swell, release. 

On Easter, she wears a lacy blouse to church,
knee length skirt, a two inch slit up one side, holding

her sister’s hand, a worn, cracked Bible under her arm.
She smells of strawberry soap,

says the morning Psalm in a honey-thick drawl.
She leaves next month for the fairs back east

to ride the merry-go-round as her mother sells candy apples
and Daddy barks for chances to pierce balloons with darts.

That fall they’ll see the morning paper:
    her picture from the yearbook,

        a woman’s haggard cheeks,
        a spring-popped, stained mattress.
   
She’s gone six months, replaced by
other fantasies, but somehow, gone

won’t do at all.  More like:
withered, engulfed,

replacing absent, not here, which are
temporary.  But they can’t help it either way:

looking at her school portrait,
chin tilted upward, searching the horizon,

they remember the swing of her body –

December at Blanket Hill

The hill is untidy in winter
dead daffodils weedy like tangles of hair.  In spring
they bloom, of course, but
somehow, this seems more fitting—

In the vistor’s kiosk, their pictures are arranged

in a square, like the song [tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming]. 

My uncle dated the one with almond sliver eyes, head turned
away from the camera, entranced by something

   behind her.

She was not a protestor.

I imagine her my aunt sometimes:
at Christmas, beside him at the piano,
hair longer, draped over her shoulders ,
that same distant gaze as she nestles

her head in his neck, plays a snowy song.

She’s twenty in this picture, and that’s
what gets me thinking—

Imagining is not so different from reflecting,
facing both forward and backward:
a cut-out head on folded paper,
wondering why your uncle is single,
the hill full of weeds, why no one
remembers in winter, or comes to
clean up the mess.