This Light Never Turns Green

 All around others have the car seat tipped back,

sun roof wide with clouds, the occasional bird,

a kite, early Van Morrison low on the stereo

that never needs batteries or gas, no engine

to make it go.  Out there:  reclined seats, flip-

flopped feet kicked out the side window or

on a dashboard where a hula dancer hangs,

            Mahalo, Aloha.

            A bumper-sticker – Namaste.

Red is Zen.

Someone has stretched a blanket in the bare

intersection; a man sprawls reading the Bhagavad Gita,

eating grapes from the silver bowl resting next

to a jug of sweet iced tea.

            A little girl paints the center divider,

an oceanscape with a great white Beluga whale.

Her mother reads Vanity Fair on the hood of her VW,

rubbing perfume samples on her wrists.

            Then,

in all that air, under that rainbow-tailed kite,

a sound begins.

Like song, it grows to a belly wail, something

from a dark place, a place of prayer, the place

between ribs and the plaster ceiling of the stomach. 

The mother looks up from her magazine, an article

about a man marooned in the aftermath of a hurricane,

his yacht caught in miles of white sand.

            She’s curious, this reader, at this sound

all around her.  Not annoyed, she looks straight

at me, the red-faced woman in the green Subaru,

leaning on her horn.

Kim Culbertson March 2007