Girl In Flowerprint Poem by A.Z. McCoy

Once I saw a girl
Her smile swept
Along a song
Of plucked harpwire,
Nectar-lined and blooming
Wreaths and laurels strung

Across misty sea
Green eyes traveling
Some lost gulfstream,
A whisper of forgotten.
I wondered if the fishermen knew
Where such songs go, about
All that slips through their netting

She wore a flowerprint dress.
Firework hue in leap
From each blossom,
Blaze of astral semaphores
Across a smoke-hazed atrium.
Rains began,
Of atmospheric dust fallen
On lush verdant she'd walk across

My tiptoeing heart's stutter
Trembled to witness
Her well-dressed line of admirers.
Their faces shone of hope,
Of Possible:
To steal smile or kiss
From Beauty's lonely child

A seasick rollick in my guts
Buried the lost skiff
Twisted ashore
To foreign land
Slash-and-burn ceremony of the natives alight
And I dousing
Gulps of lukewarm beer
Between my sighs and hopes,
And eyes in perpetual return to her,
Nothing but her
And her chiaroscuro ring on fire

The candles glowed
Night flickered on as it does
Motions and orbits found gravity
And a parched sailor's stagger
Found visions:
What's seen across nightskies
In falling-to-morning youth,
Her face in midnight's lovely,
A pinball twinkle in
Stretched glittering blackness

She spoke:
Orbits she did not own.
And I floated freely
Tied to boulder,
Past sanity's embankment
On clumsy descent
Into a night with her
And her carefree, Gracelight waltz.

Dream of Buenos Aires
Wrapped in Jacaranda bloom.
An abandoned tire now found
Bounces over San Telmo cobblestone,
Grazes along her dress's hemline,
Flowers and laughs echoing
Down gritty corridor,
Labyrinth unwrapped to Dawn
Petals traveled far in Wind's call.