Four

     – to Boo

I can remember four

all because of two nights.

Mother and Father moved

into a Spanish house

that year.  We came loosely

bundled after midnight,

down the alkaline road

south, so long, so fiery.

Big Eva, Dutch nanny,

read icy tales from Grimm

till the indigo sky

went black in the high car

window ... motoring dreams.

Two pillow-minded drunks,

my sister and I reeled

through echoing cool rooms

to fall in shadowy beds.

It was a run-hide house

with a pomegranate tree

in the old court below

where the wind never came.

Within a week, the red

below my room (that no-

red-like-it red) took me,

with its tart seeds, fast friends

so that afterward when

the circus stopped outside

and I could not come down,

having been bad that day,

but high over the court

watched them in their costumes,

after supper singing

out through the tall rose gate,

up the around-town hill,

the pomegranate tree was

bleeding in the dusk,

redder than the clown's mouth

and redder than Rose Red.

Moore Moran

© 1987; originally printed in The
Threepenny Review.  Reprinted by
permission of the author.