vigilante girl remembers summer 1998

here comes the vigilante summer, 1998-

talking in theives' cant and building the emerald

city. formal shepherds of thought, double-breasted

replace the homespun canvas boys who used to

carry the staffs. the country laid out like a story-

book with eyes like owls. shoes as vital as life

and bread holding our feet together. this is

'98.

hereitcomes.

straw and wheatpaste and black paint

making a scarecrow man to lead us where

the shepherds couldn't take us. a voice ten

thousand times bigger than its owner, and

of course we thought him the guru. highwaymen

know better than we do. our purses were slit,

leaving us only the bundles of our pasts, uneven

gaits like lamed horses, treading water like a yellow

brick road. trying to make our own justice like

vigilantes, waiting for 1998.

hereitcomesfallingdown.

looking back to berlin, nine years past, bowing

and chasing each other like children back to israel.

tripping over a river with no ford. stealing back

into oz. we lay for twenty seconds in feigned sleep,

and then got up to eat. we were lost in the forest

until we grew up; and then we came back to the

world, and could not stop thinking of emerald arches

and overexposure.

hereitcomes nineteenninetyeight

starlings hopping through blackcurrant bushes

mockingbirds reading mood verse and laughing

mods and hippies in intersecting venns with jews

I on a six-winged horsethatcannotfly

intersecting over a patch of fields, built around

the emerald city and the lost forest, giving up

on homemade and store-bought shepherds and

hereitcomes lionofjudah nineteenninetyeight