Sumac

from Field Stones
by Robert Kinsley

It grew just about anywhere, wild
as the hair of the boy who lived
down the road, the boy who pissed
at you from the branch of a tree
one summer playing tag, whose mother
hid in closets whenever it stormed.  Not
quite normal my parents would say
and left it at that accepting some things
as they did, the unpredictability of weather
or the poison touch of sumac, and no matter
how many times they warned us not to
touch it we always did managing to brush
against it certainty, the red rash rising
like that boy's laugh, his stream of piss
headed straight for us, the vaporous heat of
it lifting golden in the summer air.