i cannot try every flavor
of ice cream on every summer afternoon
when the restless sun stripes the
empty vinyl booths of the
dated 1960s parlor in
gauzy, burnt yellow.

but you ask anyway.
you always ask, wearing
that faded blue baseball cap
that has no place in your burnt-yellow 50s
and a sari velcroed too high up your torso.
you look like a colorful burrito, i laugh
so you don't hear.

"stop pretending," i want to say
between the vanilla and the
strawberry, because that's
all i ever have.

i never do, though. instead, you remind me
i get the vanilla on my Eddie Bauer sleeve every
time the sun spies
and the gauzy strips of afternoon
slide across my face.

"i like vanilla," i say, apropos of
nothing. you nod, i think, or else
you take another cream-starved lick of
your cone, stacked like a lego plaything
with vanilla, strawberry, and
vanilla again.

sometimes, but not every time, after ice cream
we walk the long oak-lined boulevard
that leads to the house. many of those
totems have stood for 100 years.

"good for you," i nod,
staring up at their petrified limbs and cagey leaves.
and with a vanilla moustage hugging my upper lip,
i thank the oaken giants for living 100 years
and never leaving.