At the Top

Up there, in the cage at the top
of the slide with Kenny Morrison,
grinning knowledge at each other
we neither of us had, and me pretending
I was a vampire under the pink moon
and you could feel the knowledge
                                                          blowing
this way a little, a little that, as though
the decision was not yet made,
what would it have taken?
                                                    A stretching of toes
across the platform between us?
A shy-eyed leaning, perhaps, and down
the shiny slide under the moonlight
to the light-wetted tarmac,
a hand, perhaps, clung tight
to a hand, to run across
the park, a dodge away
into the reckless dark?
                                          What if,
with his grey eyes, he’d held me
closer and I had shut my clever mouth
or if the moon had drawn a cloud
across itself just long enough … ?
                             But the pinkish moon
was all to us that night, too pink
and bright to never build a story on.
And wasn’t it Kenny told me, it was
no matter if I knew it yet or not,
the way was drawn and we’d
be drawn together when
the time was right?

Anne Stewart

in collection The Janus Hour, 2010, Oversteps Books,
ISBN 978-1-906856-16-8;
previously in Virginia Warbey Poetry Competition anthology, 2009