This poem published in Shoots & Vines.
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Buster Peacock & The House of Many Colors
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.Julie Buffaloe-Yoder
When the city of Freeville
widened the highway,
they didn’t plow down
a single shingle in
.
Foxcroft
White Pointe
Golf Crossing.
.
Instead, they took
Buster Peacock’s land.
A blind old black man
in a felt blue hat
with a sagging shack
on twenty acres of
scrub pine and sand.
.
That house was old
even in Jim Crow’s day
when Buster carried
his sweet Veleetha
over the threshhold,
felt the angles of her face
the curve of her hips,
a perfect place for babies:
.
Buster Jr.
Scoochie
Little Toot.
.
Buster Peacock could feel the color
of four rooms with his fingers, the tips
of his toes–the brown creak and sigh
from tired floorboards at night.
The way the feather bed felt
like cool water blue when
the breeze blew gauze curtains
over Veleetha’s sleeping face.
.
That little red place in the doorway
where Scoochie bumped his head
when he got so tall, the gold notches
where Buster Jr. carved his name,
the yellow dip in the hallway where
Toot liked to slide in socks.
.
The silver click of the cuckoo clock
exactly eight steps from a gray hum
from the refrigerator, the green smell
of the breadbox on a hot June day.
.
The city could not understand
why Buster cried so hard
over a broke down shack.
They gave fair market value.
.
But they didn’t care that
you can’t place market value
on a breadbox or children
grown or a wife passed on.
.
The day they moved him
to a retirement home,
the dozer crushed
through his front door.
Buster could feel color
all over again.
.
.
The Buffaloe Pen 