The Drama Teacher’s Parade Float in the Rain

It might be perfection,
this impossible Memorial Day memory,
the smell of a wool blanket pulled
(from behind the seat of a camouflaged bus)
damp and fragrant over her yielding shoulders;

the moment I smelled the scent of her,
the moment she wasn’t the drama teacher—
the moment, ageless between us.

By camouflaged, I mean the bus was covered
in Papier-mâché parade flowers, pink,
each meticulously formed by her caressing
hands, white-pasted-smooth-artistic-hands,
the same hands that missed a blouse button,
the same hands on the steering wheel.

She drove the lumbering float so slowly
that the baton twirlers could march
ahead of us, dancing between our pink flowers
and the dump truck filled with the high
school band playing John Philip Sousa’s
Our Flirtation, interrupted by every rocking
pothole in the road.

It started to rain. Out came colorful umbrellas
filling both sides of the road. The warm Eastern Shore
potato-rain rivulets spread down the windshield
breaking the world into a Monet image;

the Red, White, and Blue twirlers,
the rainbow-bloom of umbrellas, flag waving children,
starchy blue band uniforms, and time itself, all leisurely
absorbed by the impossibly slow and dreamy pace
of our bus, dripping Papier-mâché flowers
as we progressed along the saline steaming-streets
while fog formed on the hot windshield
until she said, at last, “We need air.”

She closed her window, manually cranking
the knob, tilting hard, side-to-side,
each turn releasing her blouse a little,
the erupting air conditioner pebbling her insistent chest
while she leaned forward, hard, desperately
trying to follow the pale stockings
of the baton twirlers ahead.

I draped the musky wool over her, my arm around her shoulder
for a moment, everything between us touching
for an innocent reason, but touching —

and then it happened — a profound tension,
her sweltering body draining rivulets of sweat down
into the cotton folds of her open blouse,
the sweet smell of her mixed with the musk of wool,
the windshield Monet of colors separating us from the world,

and I’m convinced we both sensed it,
a perfect moment of timeless, ageless perfection;
the moment I wasn’t a boy,
the moment she wasn’t a teacher,
the moment I will remember all of my life.