Primer Poem by Martin Walls

Clotted heat. The brush mats & paint gums the ferrule.
I sit back, exhausted. Then reach for thinners.

All day like this, priming a railing fence, sweat stinging my eyes,
The iron too hot to grip & endless as summer.

On the sidewalk water guns & hoses make dappled pools;
Cardinals & robins squat breast-bone deep; the grass
combed in ecstatic swirls.

Cricket-squirt & bird-shrill. The lawn sprinkler metronomes,
And the songs of high-pitched girls tumble like church bells—

This is the music of childhood's inner country, its geography
I know by heart:
The quick tug of bandaids; the smell of witch-hazel & camphor;
lemonade's sickly quench—

Now the maple shadows are stretched like bodies in a dream,
And I see my shadow is crowned with light reflecting
from windows behind me.

I stand, stripped to the waist.
My hog-bristle brush is a flag in my hand, & when I move
the crown of light moves.