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729 Aleda Shirley “One Summer Night” In this poem Aleda Shirley remembers a summer night in Oakland, in Warren County, when she was a girl and surrounded by her loved ones—and ice cream, a moon, and a mimosa tree. h The sherbet-colored lawn chairs arranged themselves in pairs, like dancers, and my grandfather rattled his newspaper, cigarette smoke curling like a bad mood around him. This was how it was twenty years ago in Oakland, Kentucky: my uncles telling jokes as they took turns turning the ice cream freezer, my grandmother drying her hands on her apron and, there, by the door, my mother talking softly to her sisters about a time longer ago than this one I long for. Slow, like a slow dance: my cousins and I waded through green shadows and touched the tips of honeysuckle to the tips of our tongues. The walnut, heavy with fruit, was a ship with tall pink sails, the patio a kind of shore and the adults calling Girls, ice cream the light of a lighthouse beaming across dark distance. Night fell gently as if it were bending down to look in our faces; waving sparklers we filled the air with rhinestones, so profuse and lovely they had to be fake. Odd now to think no one had walked on that moon rising in the mimosa’s shallow limbs and off to understand how, much more than that night, I want to know they want it back as much as I do. For this I would forfeit my dozen cities, even the loveliest one; 730 The Kentucky Anthology the thin clear goodnight the child calls from across the street; my lover’s hand on my upper arms as he rises above me in the dark. I’d give up the secrets I’ve coaxed from memory’s closed fist and the ability to articulate them. Though not the desire. ...

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