Translucent

 

Translucent

The woman who taught me that beautiful word?
My third grade art teacher, Miss Lupo, whose name

sounded translucent, and meant wolf in Italian. She
wore long, full skirts printed with The Eiffel Tower

and The Leaning Tower of Pisa. Allowed us to plunge
hands into the raw elbow macaroni and dried lentils

she'd brought in for our opaque collages. We wanted
to pretend they were gold coins from a treasure chest

instead of making art, running fingers through them,
chanting I'm rich, I'm rich. She laughed and sat on a

too-small chair with her sketchpad. That day was
nearly the first night that year I went outside after

supper in the dusk with her new word for its new air:
translucent. Some of us had headlights on our bikes

and rode slow loops around the block, feeling adult.
Everything had gone blue except the still-warm tar

the village put down to patch pot holes on the road.
Tar made me think of obsidian, another sweet word

that shared its inky hue. So I slid off one sandal to
poke the tar with a toe, chanting obsidian, translucent

like a spell: twilight had its own roll call. It was getting
dark later now, and there were names for everything.