We were always making shelters, you and I.
Bowers in summer, snow forts in winter, indoors
on that black flowered rug under the grand piano,
mothball-scented blanket tents in the basement,
sofa cushion barricades upstairs.

So were I to fashion a childhood ideogram
as Larry Levis imagines, a sibling coat of arms
just for us, roofed space would embrace mementos 
of our young-together years: a chokecherry tree,
mudpies emblazoned with hot-pink Pepto-Bismol
hued azalea petals (no match for that tincture in
official heraldic lists); faded chalk lines of infinite
hopscotch courts cross-hatching the field, and to tie
it all together, a diagonal crack in the enamel of my
left front tooth, a life-long souvenir from a fall down
the kitchen stairs when I was nine and you were five. 

A bend sinister.  An augury of something.  Not sure what.