✨ White Blouse
A simple thing...
White Blouse
The afternoon you wore white,
herons slunk away from the banks of the Eleven Point,
kids on Aid Avenue abandoned chalky chalk,
and the white collars at the bank
traded in for blue chambray and bib overalls.
A simple thing.
A white blouse.
A button undone.
An old standard
that Tony Bennett could harp
in his sleep.
The fine sidewalk crack
that makes an S
in front of your porch.
—Dave Malone
From View from the North Ten: Poems after Mark Rothko’s No. 15, Mongrel Empire Press, Copyright © 2013. Used by permission of the poet. Photo by Alexey Demidov, Creative Commons, via Unsplash.
This could stand on its own: "A simple thing. / A white blouse. / A button undone."
I enjoy Dave's poems a lot, for their understatement.
Wow, love all this imagery! This poem caught my eye -- makes me rethink a white blouse, being a girl as pale as a ghost who never wears white! "... that Tony Bennett could harp / in his sleep." Wow.