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True Love

We sat in canvas chairs watching

The Fiddler on the Roof under the stars

on the evening of a hot day

an unexpectedly cool breeze

traveling through the park

crescent moon lazing

behind a cottonwood tree.

Just a local amateur production

with plenty of off-key singing but

evocative nonetheless.  And I flipped

easily through my brain’s catalog

of evenings spent just like this

as a girl in the free seats at the St. Louis

Muny Opera with my mother my aunt

my sisters and later my best friend

once or even twice in the ticketed seats.

The night air blew through in just this way

that same moon hung above just like this

cottonwoods swayed beyond the stage

the sky took on that very shade of blue and

eventually the first star popped out for a wish.

My dreamy girl’s heart opened wide back then

to the romances played out onstage and I

longed for my own imagined future

in which True Love won out grandly over

the mundane of everyday life.

The love I was absolutely certain I’d

one day have; the mundane never.