Strawberry Stockings

He was Ranger Series 8
survey/recon on the verdant plumey world.
A globe of lettuce and shrub-brush.
Only the laser-slashed paths his roto-van took
separated man from greenery.
He had been stationed here for close to a year,
just he & his thoughts & wayward memories.
Cold-war photographs of another time,
dinner parties & chrome ceiling lights...
a voice like a paintbrush
a touch like a silver spider
a kiss like cinnamon & wet shrapnel.

Alone now in the van compartment,
feeding visual documentation into the computer,
he was thwarted at every turn.
The cineraria burst into ash before him,
the turret blazing a precise path.
But he was directionless.
There was this world out there
and the tiny, cloistered thing that was now just
lax recollection.
Romantic perfumes and epic scales.
He felt like he would go mad if it continued.

When he came to the road he was stunned.
It was two lanes wide and paved w/ fossilized fuels.
He distended the turret
and emerged from the thatch and pelt.
He drove freely along uncharted terrain.
After a while, he even discontinued the datamark.

How long did he travel so?
Eternal magic hour
the planet's sun in a constant unchallenged headlock,
its pink and rosey rays painting the sky,
light as spilled dashes of wine.
(he could see the sky...he could see the sky!)
No tropicana blotting the vertical.
Nothing but this strange, unexplored road.

The first girl he passed was barely adolescent,
the second was his age a decade back.
The third...

He passed these creatures
and more emerged.
It would be barren & quiet for long intervals,
merely the lick of the wheels on the packed surface,
the acceleration of the engine...
and then when he barely held out hope
another would emerge.

Girls like stalks,
long-legged things w/ furnace red hairs
and lacey blonde brows.
Battering lashes and sashays...
They were incredibly young
and vibrated thermo-nuclear hearts.
A pack of lavender eyes.
All of them stripped and bare
except for peppermint-striped stockings
or sheer pink hoisery.

He couldn't stop-- he musn't.
They were indigenous
and it became alarmingly clear...
that the more his thoughts strayed,
the more arcane, aged memory he dredged up...
the more & many emerged.
They postured patiently alongside,
the uncut foliage shielding them in perpetual twilight.
The roto-van scurried past them
& nary an eye glance nor acknowledgement
did he grant.
Oh no.

The smell permeated the compartment,
his fingers tight on the wheel sweated the reek...
a call of strawberries.
A sirensong as potent as liquid.

Now the computer failed
and when he finally tried the radio distress
or dry fired the lasers in the midst
nothing worked.
Just the span of wheel over mantled earth,
the steady headlong plight.
It continued all throughtout that long twilight,
maidenheads and unsheathed curls
and a smell like powdered summer.

The last girl stepped out into his pathway
she was still a distance
but he could see her blank, new look...
her desireable traces.
The vinework twisted 'round her perfect waist.
The elastics holding her legs.
He would not brake
He would--