Panhandle

Bang it all, Jack Spicer
there can be but the one Mellow Yellow
rolling out from that Victorian on Fell
into lusty fog
gusting cold enough to take the hair off a polar bear
just at the moment a wishbone of eucalyptus
crashes through the tree’s branches
letting something go
from a restless head of light.

Only by a slight margin—five yays, six nays—
did Sue Bierman hold off the powers
and principalities who had for years licked their lips
to pave this corridor of green
to make two freeways meet
in orgies of commerce and congestion,
Sue Bierman, city planner, who’d come from Nebraska
fought through the tedium of meetings
so that I—you or anyone—could rest on a bench
Mellow Yellow wafting
on our walk through early twenty-first century
airy graces of the Panhandle,
who brought with her from the prairie an assurance
as urbane as rural—an idea of breathing
married to an idea of space—
who would one day vote against a Saks
to be installed at Union Square because it was
she said a lumpy thing to look at.