A Western skink, slunk along a rock with its tail like ink. I have never instinctively liked a reptile so much. Surreally blue its tail can be dropped for a neat escape. Of course, it fades with age into little more than a snake with tiny legs, but right now it is at odds with a drab landscape,a perfect work of art darting under the crawl space, a sensory affront yet altogether logical.
Some broad-leafed bush interruptsthe path, uncut grass grown high and gone to seed. Bindweed and briars– everything is reaching. The bridge up again, we wait. Half-packed, this apartment begins to resemble howit looked when we moved in. They dug a channel to connect the two lakes, but is there any markthat cannot be erased? Which reminds me thatI’ll have to patch and paint.
After a choice, calm. Beyond the ropes, beyond the purview of the lifeguard, belonging inthe boundless. All roads lead to Rome.All water feels like home: We return and return and erasemotion with movement. Intuition is not always rational, but neither is it irrational, the professor said. No paths or routes here,courses set by wind and current, lines drawn and gone, my arms reciting a swimmer’s geometry,every angle opening in time with my breath.
By the time we got to the pool the clouds were rolling in but the pool deck was still warm and left indentions on our skin as we sat and a little boy lost his net in the unheated water, the shallow end. Still too deep for him, he instead swung around the handrail with the glee of someone who has dropped something and has no intention of ever picking it up.
Getting ready to move, getting rid of most things, finding the little bits of life that got tucked in old books and stuck behind drawers. It’s been years, years, years since I smoked and I’ve found five lighters already. And umpteen train tickets to Creil, Clermont-de-l’Oise. A postcard never sent, half in French. Books with friends’ maiden names inscribed. A jolt from red ink, written by my grandmother some seventeen years ago, and a greeting card photo she […]
White rot on the garlic bulbs is slowly felling the crop, not all at once but one by one. And so it goes, disappointment. Sudden failure is easier to bear than watching these leaves wilt from the tips, almost as they would when ready for harvest. Which would be soon if any pull through; the gardener across the way has ripped his up, I’ve left some in the hope– in the hope. At this point still reaping […]
Sick as a dog all weeklaid out on the sofa watching the flightof a ball miles uponmiles South. There’ssomething to be saidfor a 90 minute match,clear elation or heart-break within a man-ageable amount of time. And staying onthe pitch, playing until time. I might even forgive a divefor attention, lazybut at least it showsa type of keennessthat these days seems so rare.
To be honest I’ve lost three places. It’s how things come. My dad wrote that the last time he didn’t see any jellyfish, sometimes the winds push them into Mobile Bay, line the shores with orange-striped remains. Then storms would roll in from the Gulf, kick up a chop and pulverize them till every wave had bits of barbs and every swim was risky. The ocean always giving and taking, constellations of coquina shells along the surf, three houses […]
June bugs, thunderstorms, hurricane glass. I had never been so far from home or so long from it. Some places are just hanging on, even as a kid you can feel it, floating on the surface while the river runs deep. Don’t let that dog out all alone, there’s gators. I lost this place, all the way. First an empty boat slip, the pool filled in, then huddled in the workshop after the wake, sawdust and dust like snow, snow […]
I sleep to wake and wake to dream in dappled shade some long afternoon which says more I do not know: the way the foothills fall under the lake or how this absence shores them up as I sleep to wake and wake to dream quiet descends when the heat pump fades everything has a voice and a silence of its own and which speaks louder I do not know the grapes are small before […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 