She stands next
to her wooden pushcart,
flowers woven
through dirty-blonde hair
splashing
uncombed across a bare shoulder
above a cotton
dress with daisy chains.
She is part of
the diaspora,
flower children
who didn’t turn
into mortgage
bankers or feminists
or soccer moms
kicking the ball
and life down
the road
one day at a
time
until they hit
the white picket fence,
until they saw
that shadow beckoning,
the one who ends
all music festivals
that celebrate
braless abandon.
She smiles and
hands violets to passersby,
and I wonder who
made the better choice.
The world needs
bankers and lawyers
and such, so
they say.
Doctors pull us
out of the mud of germs
that seem to
infect daylight itself,
and a
short-haired priest
told me when the
time was out of joint
that surely it
all must mean something.
Something.
For the violet
girl, that’s the sum total.
Life is
something this and something that,
a procession of
days
like a ragtag
second line in New Orleans
that ends up
somewhere just like the jazz notes
it plays.
It all comes
together somehow to make
something.
But I can’t put
my finger on it,
not exactly,
unlike the
violet girl who believes,
like dear
Alfred,
that the grand
unified theory
is a violet or a
nameless flower
in a crannied
wall.
~William Hammett
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