Michael Berryhill, a Houston born and based poet, was a friend from the age of eight on after his family moved behind our house in the East End, a true backyard buddy. He passed recently in hospice.
Here is initial poem from Backyard Suite, my memorial to the Edenic source of our shared poetic vocation.
***
1 – Honeysuckle Taint
Big trees grew smaller,
small ones big. I could
reach the third crotch
of the supple willow,
tippy toe to catalpa
pods once shinnied up
after. Surreptitiously I
picked a fig. It smacked
of delights so simple they
had passed me by, wrestling
with boys in breechclouts
over thistles and thorns,
mulberries chewed with tar
exuded by summer heat
from telephone poles tasting
of pinard from Provence.
With gentle, bruising brushes,
as one might caress a clitoris,
I turned gardenia petals brown,
its honeysuckle taint
a chorus of smells
redolent of the imp,
the impervious scamp
I no longer am.
Precepts may be percepts
(or vice-versa),
amnesia be tractable
to ophactory cure.
Backyard Suite consists of the following:
1 – Honeysuckle Taint
2 – Memory, the Mockingbird
3 – Sad To Be a Child
4 – Yard
5 – A Session of Therapy
6 – Gladiola
7 – Shinny