Seagrove

Six p.m. on the two-lane highway into Seagrove Beach, Florida. The rental car smells like fast food and cigarettes. Roll the windows down, and the windshield fogs up immediately. I can hear the ocean, or maybe just the tires on the asphalt. Every concrete seam is another crashing wave.

It's pitch-black already. I think briefly about reality: the tilt of the Earth's axis, and our yearly lap around a star. And then I imagine that the dark is caused by the declining relationship of sun and beach. They used to fit together so well, but they're not getting along so well anymore.

There is nothing on the car stereo. I hate the noise the radio makes every time I turn it on. I didn't think to bring any CDs, and the iPod in my back pocket might as well be a brick, without headphones or aux cable.

In my head, it is 2004, and Pretty Girls Make Graves' "The New Romance" was the soundtrack to an otherwise hazy vacation, punctuated by frequent, fruitless real estate excursions.

2006, and Gnarls Barkley has just released "St. Elsewhere". The single is playing in every restaurant and gas station from here to Oklahoma. We drive down the beach to Seaside and talk, pointing out every building featured in that Jim Carrey movie, and you tell me how you guys are trying to get pregnant. I'm happy for you, but scared. An era is coming to a close. I think that era might have been childhood, and then wonder just how long I've been deluding myself.

Four years later. I am wondering idly what a seagrove is. I'm sad to have missed the sunset, since the silhouettes of palm trees are among my favorite things. I wonder what you're thinking about tonight. Maybe it's the little girl you were so excited about bringing into the world, or what she looked like on the day you had to bury her in the cold ground.

I think about whether the bacteria in the gulf still biofluoresce at night in the winter, and what life means, and whether I'll ever stop missing you.

Stray, Puppy

Lately I feel like Time is taking my memories from me
one by one
and he hangs them on a silvery string around his neck like the teeth of his enemies or like ears cut from the fallen
like charms to ward away his immortality

I’m sure that when you’re Time the eons seem like such a prison
nothing ever changes
nothing ever ends
nothing has ever ended
or ever will

and all of that Forever leaves one with a thirst for closure

So I feed him my memories
A little something every day to keep his energy up

He gets fed twice on the days I dream the morning away
and on the nights I drink myself into forgetting

And now when Time follows me like the stray puppy Momma warned me not to feed
the handmade silver collar around his neck jingles
rattles like a chain in some stupid ghost story

I don’t mind the reminder
I feel sorry for something so helpless that it can’t even gain a new perspective

but every time I try to give it one of mine
I get a new one instead

Scuffed

The swingset creaks under our weight while the slack chains creak in the rising Oklahoma wind and the moon strains to be seen through a low blanket of clouds.

My toes stretch, bare, too cold, soles scuffed from our barefoot midnight walk, longing for the nearest branch with its splash of newborn green, its nursery of leaves yawning and unfurling after their winter nap.

The air smells like electricity, like change, like life borne on the wind, or on the wings of great flights of birds come back from the southlands to weigh down the lines that make our computers and telephones and fluorescent lights work nonstop, all the time, forever.

Your shadow is long underneath the street light, and the gusts tug at your trenchcoat, crying anachronism, and threaten to pull you away like some kind of backwards Marry Poppins into the night.

The currents make dimples in the black skin of your umbrella and its handle twists against your palm, willing you to let yourself go as the first few fat drops splash in your hair, on your nose, on your forehead, and cling to your eyelashes.

We all laugh in different languages and mouth silent goodbyes to the chalk effigies on the sidewalks, and suddenly the air is ten degrees cooler and the sirens start humming to tell us yes – this is the front.

What I love about this season is all of the destruction and the renewal, and the way the rivulets and the puddles take the stinging heat from my scuffed soles.

Doors, Floors, etc.

I lived so much of my former life behind doors.

Behind closed doors. Locked doors.

Doors designed to be thick enough to muffle the sounds of life behind them.

Doors designed to minimize the amount of light that could pass through or around them.

Doors that shut me in, locked me up, locked me out.

Doors I didn’t look at, listen at, knock on.
Doors I didn’t walk through.

And now I live in this house, this old house, the oldest house I have ever breathed in.
The oldest house I have ever breathed in.
The oldest house I have ever dreamt in,
cared for,
abused.

I live in this house, which is so old that the door frames are crooked, and uncaring,
whose doorframes do not allow for me to live closed and sheltered and protected from prying eyes, prying ears,
not even in the shower,
this house that has opened me to the world.

Outside of this house there is a wealth of experience that I can feel even here, in the floor boards – even in the floorboards which are covered by some kind of new laminate substance -- I wonder how many children grew up in this house, how many winters passed huddled by the fireplace which is boarded up and which no longer can be imagined to be like a door.

I wonder how long before the rest of this place is boarded up and forgotten – how many more generations of people like me can really live here,

who breathe in the change and wonder

and who wonder what comes next.

The 48th Street Oak

Years ago,
you bought a house for a tree.
A great sprawling vine-wrapped oak that hung over the roof,
raining pollen in the spring time and casting shade in the summer,
making the yard rustle like old, dry paper through the autumn.

The years passed and sloughed off the seasons one by one.
The tree grew. So did we all.

I spent my summers sprawled in the shade behind that house,
with the pages of whatever book I was reading rustling in the same breeze that made the branches wave and the vines dance.

A few weeks ago you told me you’re selling the house
because of that tree.

These days, it’s too frightening to think of a branch falling off of that decrepit oak and crushing the place your bed occupies in space.
It’s too burdensome to think of trimming that tree and removing its discarded leaf litter and sneezing your way through the pollen each year.
In your old(er) age, everything is “too” something.

So you listed the house with a realtor who describes our tree as “majestic” and the home you made as “meticulously maintained”, and you’re moving to a place where the trees and the houses are all younger than I am, and the neighbors are all older than you are, older than you’ll ever feel – and somehow, that all just seems lonely.

Cold Front

The front blew through on the north wind
and the cold is inside me again,
like rats in the walls,
scrabbling to get out.

Outside, the delicate flower pedals and
hesitant, budding trees
shake in the insistent wind,
bending low under the stale slate sky.
Color drains from the new growth and I expect snow stained red and yellow.
What there is grows colder and more colorless every day.

Just Learning

Airplane bellies flash white in the sun,
like clumsy, rolling trout
under the direction of student pilots.

Monster

She knew he had eyes like television static
Never the same, except that they imparted no message,
felt no sympathy,
and held her captive,
like red python eyes before a strike.

She imagined that his heart beat savagely against his ribcage,
as if it hoped to be set free.
His atrioventricular and sinoatrial nodes sparked out of time,
sparked so fiercely that the burning he felt in his belly
was real fire, eating away his cardiac tissue.

She imagined that when his heart gave out,
he would go on living – or whatever it was he did.

She imagined that he filed his teeth down
like a rodent
in order that he might maintain a semblance of humanity.

She imagined that fingernails and toenails grew
as if pulled from his flesh,
that underneath his gooseflesh he could,
at any moment,
sprout spines the length of his body.

And she imagined that
everything but the television static eyes
was just an illusion she made
to make herself feel better
when he didn’t want to be around anymore.

A Budding Existentialist

There’s a certain point at which you just can’t ignore the evidence: the moon is the wrong shape and the world is spinning counterclockwise and you’ve picked the wrong major, the wrong future, the wrong boyfriend.

There comes a point in everyone’s life when nothing makes sense and the only reasonable question to ask is “what am I doing at this party?”

And that’s a valid question.
After all, it’s all allegory,
and what’s the difference between baskets of bread and fish,
and red Solo cups brimming with domestic?
The coat of many colors can just as easily be Bradford’s signed jersey;
that epic flood could have been the ice storm that ravaged campus, canceling finals and taking the trees with it when it receded.

“What am I doing at this party?” you’re thinking,
but there’s still that ping-pong ball in your solo cup,
and its contents need to be drunk.

All of this is wrong, though.
The shape of the moon.
Your major, your boyfriend,
and that new pair of shoes you bought last week.

What are you doing at this party?
What is this party doing to you?

For Margaret

Seasons change,
and every limping day passes unremarked, it seems.

But who can afford to be unremarkable?

Autumn brings with it the whistle of escaping heat –
Oklahoma is finally finished steaming through.
It brings dust on the breeze and swirling dried leaves rasping
across porous concrete, still swollen and dripping with the warmth of summer.

Soon winter’s bony fingers will beckon,
and we will run headlong into cutting wind and the treachery of icy sidewalks,
to the grey infinity that is a constant overcast, and the dull loneliness that comes from missing the sun.

And sunny California waits with open arms and an open mind –
a blank slate, an open book.
California waits with a spring come months early,
if you can only outrun


the winter.

Swan

Midnight,
and he nimbly weaves a tiny swan
from what’s left of his notebook paper.
He proffers it in cupped hands;
joy lights up his face.