the window that has been my window for five years frames wine dark pavement and a listing power line in this moment with this mind and water hazing the pane I see it as if for the first time more beautiful than anything
Month: October 2021
it’s like this
i think about you when i’m warming the car
at 5am on dark winter mornings
the green glow of the digital clock mounted on the dash
searing into my eyes like the sights
of some predatory animal
i want to tell you about things i haven’t thought
of in years like standard transmissions
and american spirit cigarettes and porch wine
and when i’m washing dishes in the sink
the window a black mirror
reflecting the dark grooves of my night face
back into the kitchen, i think of you again
i want to tell you about swimming in quarries
at night jumping from the precipice above
and plunging deep into its reservoir
finding the surface by the buoyancy
of my body alone
when I’m laying with my children
in darkened bedrooms breathing quiet
and waiting for them to turn their tired bodies
towards sleep i want to tell you
about the soft bed of my childhood
the popping embers and smoldering sage
my hair combed one thousand and one times
the musty books scheherazade aesop’s fables
the Iliad
i want to pad barefoot in my flannel nightgown
to your warm bed pull the plug of moss
from your ear and whisper everything
never knowing if you were awake
or what you heard
ocean floor apology
your grief was so big that when you turned up your palms to me i cracked on contact in an instant my lungs filled with water parenchyma turned to pumice and I fell backwards in a slow dive through the thermocline abyss the world was a tunnel of light first weak then mottled until it was gone for four months i drifted quietly past lost cities spying through unhinged balustrades tube worms growing on parquet floors the translucent skins of young girlfriends baking bread on tectonic plates wounds slashed in the volcanic sea mount so necrotic that they created their own weather patterns of rot and finally settled mute and decisive in the primordial silt an infinite pause a crypt-silent nautilus of waste pregnant with the heavy thing that hope becomes when it is dead in deep sea slow motion a ghost crab pads softly past puffing up years of gentile sediment with its fragile finger bones four days later it is gone from view having silently slipped past the curve of the horizon