Balloon balloon balloon

A passage from one of my favourite books, Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff:


Jeremy sits on the underside of the shopping cart,
the bottom rack
where you would put huge things
like a great big bag of dog food.
He's happy under there, he's a lion at the zoo,
as he tells me in front of the canned beet shelves.
He says my name:
"Bon see lion zoo?"He holds on to the cart like it's his cage,
scoping out the legs going past.

Now I start to pretend to be down there,
I begin looking just at legs and feet parading
past the magazines on the rack
about how a lady gave birth to a Martian
and the father of the baby is suing for visiting rights.
Down there is where bubble gum and lost shopping lists go,
stuck to the floor with bootprints on top,
and celery pieces and used pacifiers and spilled coffee beans
from the gourmet grinder.
I look down there
and that's where you see the toes of people
and their hairy ankles
and their untied shoes
and the feet of dry shrunken ladies
when their sons take them shopping.
Up higher you hear their voices
making some last request,
you see their sons go along with it,
some kind of creamed corn or oxtail soup in a can,
and you see their sons stop trying to talk them out of it.
But way down below
where Jeremy is
you just hear the scraping of their shoes
across the spilled rigatoni pieces,
and the limping old legs,
these old ones that haven't given up yet.

I'm thinking that's why they want kids to kid up top
of the cart cruising the grocery store,
up there where the world isn't such a dying, garbagy place of discards.
I'm about to invite Jeremy up top
and I bend down to get the Pepsi 6-pack and I hear
near my knees,
Jeremy's sending a message real soft,
sending it to the knees of strangers:

Balloon Balloon Balloon Balloon
Balloon Balloon Balloon Balloon
Balloon Balloon Balloon Balloon
Balloon Balloon Balloon Balloon
Balloon