The Ice-Cream Man in the little truck playing
“Bicycle Built for Two”
speeds up as I run out of my house
wallet in hand with ice-cream on my mind.
No, really … with chocolate on my mind.
not the good kind of chocolate
connoisseurs like with caramel and salt
but the kind from childhood, the ice-cream bar
with thin slabs of chocolate
around a stick of vanilla ice-cream
so cold in the heat that taste doesn’t matter,
lying with my sister on the grass before her illness
trying to eat the bars before they dripped
sticky onto our necks and chests,
nibbling the top, then the sides, and finally,
licking the last bit off the wooden stick
savoring even that woody taste.

But now the Ice-Cream man speeds down the street
at the end of his day.
He no longer hears “Bicycle Built for Two,”
or sees the line of children chasing him
or me waving my wallet
and shouting at the top of my lungs
to the receding truck,
I remember!                I remember!

FEWalls