On the hill, pass college students
running in black and white shorts,
with red and white faces.
These women athletes,
with unnative books,
look like men to me.
This city smells like a town.
The pastel homes of school teachers
and police officers are hidden behind
a church steeple in the campus courtyard.
The wrought iron fences protect students
from the neighborhood.
At 3am, my father asks a pair of co-eds
to stop having sex on our porch.
Somewhere close by, a doe-headed girl
yanks her shirt over her head.
Now it is daytime and the drill of academia
covers the stench of virgin blood loss.
Italian flags blend with American flags
against the absolute blue of the sky.
The migration of residents from
the half way house past Alumni Hall
produces a chorus of cigarette pleas
and curse words.
The post office is small,
parcels of varying levels of lawfulness
going to everywhere from here, and next door,
the last sticky lemons scraped from
the ice-coated blender at a favored ice cream shop.
The high school is adorned in four places
with wooden or brass crosses,
the occasional creep driving by
in his Volkswagen, peering through
the bone yard of achievement at tiny women in pleats.
These women, their delicate body odor,
their chariots of yellow,
the soft apple of their cheeks,
years away from running on collegehill,
are brought to anointment by a wet kiss,
obscured throughthe fences,
rushing visions of the purple necks of peacocks
to their plump and tender chests.
This can't be dangerous.
