Songs of Youth

My thin memories were born

Among the whispering grasses

Of an Indiana field sloping down

To drink from a nameless creek.

They were suckled by jiggers

And sung to by whippoorwills and crickets

Under a weeping willow by the creek

And endless summers of warm sunlight.

Hopes and expectations shot across the night sky

And sometimes danced real slow

Pressed against young girls with hair like wheat

And tissue stuffed in their brassieres.

But that was good enough for me

'Cause that's what breasts felt like

Or so I thought

In the innocence of my original sin.

They dug up that Indiana field a few years back

And built a freeway through the middle

Of my memories and sometimes I wonder

What's stuffed in their brassieres now.