In Perfect Lines Across the Deck
The sun, having lit all night the moon, catches & burns the veil of the clouds. The children, distracting us from outright despair, hurry after crabs that scuttle like thread between dying & not dying, flattening their bodies out of danger beneath the sand. Our heads they hang, staring nowhere while the doctor goes on talking, talking. This hole where the sleeve caught the fence & the hibiscus hushed, almost the same as yesterday. By degrees the brightness stretches the pastel of each house, the decorative fish & tawdry nets that drape the walls inside. The trailside thorn, how it smarts & these happy dogs, like old friends, running the length of the beach despite the claps & calling to come back. Valerie says she’d like to see our children graduate & the doctor goes on talking. Such effort to encourage the light. The sand sleeps patiently near the sea. The ocean makes its home in every shell.
Next Time We’ll Get It Right
Soon the mind concedes how ordinary the shame has become. One more grief lost in the afternoon holding hands & the stories of what came before or when I might’ve done a better job preparing, thinking for instance, as I predictably might, of changing everything like the quick & frightening accelerations out on the street. It’s true I refer to north & south as up & down, staying quite late in the bathroom until the troubles wander elsewhere & still such difficulty in saying bougainvillea or slicing the tomato on the cutting board. I put on your necklace just that once, & said at my very worst, Three, maybe six months. Half a sentence cast among the shadows of these butterflies.
Like a Country Western Song
Then the first day you don’t remember crying, then another passing beneath the trees, down the lamplit walk & into this new push of time. Then the keepsake of a pocket clacking in the hum of the dryer. A friend’s older sister, shirtless, jumping into the river below. Then a someday novelist & her dog knotted in a handkerchief on the end of a stick, carried in a scene from someone else’s life. A neighbor asks our daughter about the ambulance that morning at her home. Then like a sentence. Then the water wiped clean from either hand & promises, promises, promises. At the end of the century, last call, I told a tired stranger I’d put her in a poem. I remember now nearly everything.
