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Naïve Melody
- Wayne State University Press
- Chapter
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69 naïve melody Some photos I cannot hold without kissing— this one spilled from the pages of a book like an aster whose petals, drying there, infused the words they were pressed between with a white so vivid the novel’s droll protagonist walked out of his dark midday bar blinking at a lavish alpine meadow though it had been December in Flint. A freckle like a photo is a text the light’s helped write which explains why my friend told the kind physician that he’d sooner lick the scalpel than let her scrape six melanomas from his facial canyons—forty-odd years ago sunlight prisming on the Adriatic planted those crass moles in place, and I can still feel it, he said, bronzing my cheeks. He knew death was a wind searching the back of his hand, veins branching like his childhood sycamore leafed out in liver spots, the trunk, its scaly bark, too steep for memory to climb. But he stared at it anyway and was somewhere other than that antiseptic room. Just as I holding this glossy conjury am no longer in the chair where dawn found me tending my grief in the softening dark. I’m lying in June grass looking up at her, she’s two— 70 when I go to where he was in those late days bring me flowers to kiss, hands to press between pages, bring—Molly laughing, laughing, Molly with the sun in her mouth. ...