"this is what summer should be"

a blackwinged brighthearted fairie ladygirl said about this poem... Not so sure.

-

deergirl summeride-

I know I'm free when I let the wind dry my hair on a sunset bike ride, some ghost-transplant from a mother-tea-tree-teacher time, a city truly connected finding roots in this sun-burn suburbs, let the summer storm air tie knots in my hair and leave them—as markers, a fence against fingers, tokens of a brook-smooth lightning-laced affection.

When the first thing
in my morning
is sleep.

Then sun-tea from stolen packets, my grandmother's glass jars.

That makes your face third— like bronze, like a charm— how I wish you were here, and not. How actuality ruins ideal; the sour taste of mixed teas steeped too long.

Know I'm free when the bike veers off the path as oleanders and jasmine sing my blood to summer and I feel no fear, only enchantment with the deadly fuschia blooms, only humble amusement at the wry twisting of my own course.

When my bike-body follows behind a young mother, quiet as Deer, her daughter smiling into my eyes just before I take that turn, around the twilight cedars, too quick for rational minds to catch. I'm a ghost, a deer-girl, the breeze gentler and sweeter on my shoulders—fuzzy nape of my neck—up those too-long-arms—gentler and sweeter than any touch yes even my own, and I wonder if you see me like that sometime—swift and dear and desirable, like a color or taste from childhood, a joy you could always feel—mother's first smile, your father's spicy-scented sweater you wore that first time to the coast, soft against six-year-old-skin, that decaying-salt-bright taste to ocean air familiar to you as cigarette smoke to me—how deep those images go—wool red, slate-gray mornings, freckled skin—I wonder,if that soul -secret isn't so much falling in love as it is chasing after it, some completeness we cannot name but even scientists pine for.

I know I'm free when I can see my beloved from across a meadow and pick my steps carefully (deer girl drawn to your salty skin, the grain of your bluesweet eyes, what salt waits behind them—vast, dry oceans my feet were made soft to cross) and I am still wary, no matter how much your dog-eyed soul tells me never fear, darling – rose and jasmine sing themselves under my skin a song of summertime without leashes, my tangled hair tying me to the foxtails, dry grass, fallen trees crisscrossing the meadows...

No matter how close I get I can never tell if there are ropes in your hands—I'm always prancing round, caught in some jewelled glass jar, anxieties hot from the sun, glass box of ideal and reality, sunset playing on the planes of your face like a running brook in my mind, a stream of things I wish were like the landscape flying by—deer-girl a ghost at your fingertips, mind far-flung even when our skin makes some wildflower palette put so close together—deer-girl almost out of reach, weighing jasmine blooms a cedar-rosemary-melody, a two-wheeled summer against a doe-eyed, fearful freedom...