That one girl Charlie Brown likes with the red hair who they called Heather in the cartoons where the adults sound like Wee Wah Waw Wah

She was never quite
possible.

He spoke of her
religiously (that is,
both habitually
and reverently),
but she would forever
exist outside
his and our frames
of printed reference.

Often on spring afternoons,
still nursing a bruised back
from yet another
failed football punt,
he would assemble for her
bunches of flowers he had collected
himself, sad little bouquets
of yellow dandelion
or an occasional lilac
plucked from mother’s vase,

but he would rarely brave
her imposing doorstep,
even more seldom ringing
the doorbell and waiting
for a response.

Sometimes he dreamt
that the door would open,
that he wouldn’t dive
into a shrub or flee,
and that she would be standing
there, on the threshold,
but even in these dreams
the look in her eyes
was that of an angry goddess,
the doorstep a mythic portal
never meant to be crossed.

His cartoonist, Charles Schulz,
drew this dream once, in 1950,
in the only illustration
of her that exists
outside the glossy realm
of film and television,
which are their own
kinds of fever dreams--

but if Charlie Brown
had known how to perform
the necessary augury
to interpret the forever
disembodied adult voices
in this televised realm,
to hear them as anything
more than muted trombone,
perhaps they could have
explained things to him:

the ways in which youthful love
can manifest as a temple curtain
in a tabernacle too holy
to bear; the perils
of cheap psychiatry
and illusory field goals;
what solace can be found
in existing solely to feed
the schadenfreude of others.