The soft pop of dotted lines dreamt on treasure maps beneath the mottled rays of October’s sun still comes to me some fall afternoons,
Helping me keep the running tally of moments gone by since your dots and dashes turned into my missing keys and an empty pebble driveway.
Leaves are meandering to the ground like only you would, taking their sweet time, tiny treasure maps in hand, plotting courses that change more often than the seasonings in your mom’s pork roast.
Maybe it’s your mother’s oak stick sounding the dirge, for the tiny journeymen and their treasure maps, on the wheezing porch planks when she paces mid-afternoon. Maybe it’s the soft pop of us, a little less than a soap bubble, beneath the slanted dusks of October.
