Not that anyone caught us,
but that was the day
when Marnie and I
cut school during sixth hour
and drove my old VW bug
to the undeveloped hills
just past the edge of town.
Nothing grew there but grass
and wide open emptiness.
She’d bought some No Doz,
and though we were already
wildly alive and awake,
taking them seemed a good idea.
I don’t remember what class
I ditched—perhaps French IV,
which could explain why to this day
I cannot remember the plusque
parfait—but I recall
how barren the hills were,
their syntax of winter dry grass,
still brown, and how we ran
as fast as we could chasing
nothing we could see
as the wind grabbed the laughter
from our mouths and flung it
past the barbed wire fences,
past the highway that circled our town
until we lay at last down
and stared at the sky
conjugating the clouds
until the sun was spent
and we were cold.
No one ever asked
where we’d gone. No one
noticed the grass still
stuck in our hair,
the sky still clinging
to our clothes, the absence
of bells in our blood.
I love so much about this poem…the wildness, the abandon, the feelings of young girls….your word-choice enhances the feeling (wide open emptiness, syntax of winter dry grass, conjugating the clouds)…..but please, Rosemerry, in stanza 10, “until we LAY …” not lied. I have to think hard about the word order of “at last” and “down”…..not sure about that.
dang it! I got it wrong AGAIN!!!! I really really thought about it long and hard, too, and thought I had talked myself through it, you lie on the beach, you lay down the book. Or is that wrong??? Ugh. Thanks, Carol! I was definitely playing with the word order on purpose with the at last and down, I don’t know, felt cummings-ish or something. I may only work in my ear and not on the page. I will make that correction right now!! Thanks for the spoon full of sugar up front with the grammar correction! I need you!
Possesses a magical sense, the scene recounted. All the detail more describes the place than the characters for me, which I like, but I especially like that invisibility that ends the poem. All that rebellion gone unnoticed.