SUMMER Poem: Outrunning the Sun, by Madeleine Jacobsen

I hope you know that even as I boarded the last train of the evening
I haven’t forgotten for one moment
About our playground meetings

I remember those long and cloudless days
When the clothes on our backs felt like sandpaper to an eczema patch
Our face and shoulders kissed so good
By the sun’s loving, open rays

Melted popsicle juice between our fingertips
Was our strategy for better grip
To log the days accurately
We’d throw the sticks down to the woodchips
As we lunged and pulled ourselves through hazardous metal structures

We’d watch the last colors left in the day bleed out over the sky
Like oil paints spilling into every kind of strange hue
Moments before grays and dark blues from dirty brushes
Polluted their vibrancy
And ran them cool in time to soak the moon
And soothe the stars that dunk in, too

Like plastic water bottles, leaves, or even your ipod tunes
Eventually the breezes picked us up and carried us in two
Leaving our skin full of goose bumps and bruises
A twig or so would catch in my hair
And uproot my braids
Of mother’s hard and loving care

Each night I’d be greeted by the click of her tongue
And the sliding of yarn in her fast-paced crochet
She shook her head from side to side
“Such a crazy girl,”
She said with wrinkles between her eyes
“To think anyone could outrun the sun”

I didn’t say bye when I left
And I hadn’t bothered to raid her purse
I took what little cents I had left from various cash transactions
And bought me a train ticket from Seattle to San Diego-
39 hours, said the ticket guy, but that’s at worst

I sat alone
On a cold steel seat

Curled into a ball
Sketching calligraphy prints with an earbud on each side
As I leaned against the window pane
I watched the otters hug and duck to play beneath the tide
I played guitar music on cd
The kind you told me was good because you can’t hear
“Whatever the hell they sayin’”
Awaiting my arrival to the farther south
Where the sun waits a little longer in the year to fall.