Love is a Delicate Chain

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—for Justin in France 

Here, the heavy brown ones from your father’s coat,
there the ladybugs from Jari’s first grade dress,
and from your birthday shirt, five urgent reds.
You, sorting the buttons while I sewed. 

On a black magnetic board, 
I move words into fragments, little poems: 
travel the diamond road 
recall together lusciously 
incubate that vision 
chocolate moon 
worship delirious color 

If I study words, rearrange, and link them, 
they become personal, 
as weirdly accurate 
as a horoscope or class prediction, 
mythical as kept buttons, 
true as portions of scrambled dreams. 

Last night you were not in France, 
but in Brazil. The dream started with a sambaó
a stream of green and yellow, orange. 
Your father and I were there 
to bring you home. 

Here it rains like a bird 
Shadows crackle under light 
Magic has smeared a thousand pictures

Three of us were driving a high road. 
The moon was brown as a Hershey’s Special Dark.
Not one white star. 
We were holding to the rod of slick road,
and though the clouds were shooting rain,
your father, wearing that brown coat, 
kept the headlights off, the wipers, too.
True to form, I was fevered by the height;
my brake foot clawed the floor. 

Though you are twenty-one, 
last night you were small in the bucket of my lap,
and accurate— 
down to the heaped black hair 
and the red buttons closing your shirt.