OPTIONAL POETRY

A thunderhead  of gnats  rolled in along the shoreline,a black roil of flight. Otherwisethese days are limpid, roses wilting in the heat, and also  climbing up the walls.    

And twenty years later, home  is stilla moving target. 

I am unsure of the rationale of memory: Why, just now did I recall the way my mamawused to microwave fleas she found on the dog? How can I still see kudzu  clamor over the carport with its smart sedan, sense grayness under  old, old oaks?  Of all things flea-murder starts the flood:  a scabby cockroachin the night; the sweetness ofthe dining room curtains; thunder, spring frogs, lightning bugs.   I’d never seen them before, never had […]

And that’s the problem with working with memories. It’s work. But I am tired of this lake, these trees,  am unamused by the Ship Canal Bridge, despite a trick of angle that makes  it seem that the carsare miniatures racing across the roof and not a mile out.   I do not care if the red kayak is coming or going, am not curious as to why the tableof dental students is laughing, doubling over as they toss a box […]

And at Land’s End, the land did. With just one whale breachingoffshore, as if conjured up by the commotion on the beach,  not causing it. Unassuming, barnacled and gray, in alien skin, unaware of the sunburnt hordes of tourists, allpeeling red and  mas cerveza.Memory tends to improve a place: The scale of a sunset over granite. Similarly, the landscape of some faces.    

And at Land’s End, a pelican fell. Bird of my childhood, I watched them skim the Gulf each night, I wore the smoke of my Granddad’s stogie as we walked down towards Bon Secour, never arriving, never meaning to. Maybe it’s for the best I won’t go back before the house is sold; memories have undertows and I’ve never been good at holding my breath.  

(And in our bones are arches:) Cathedral spaces, relics of our own, aqueducts– canaliculus, lacuna– at our core we are more antique Roman than Danish modern. That belongs to the birds; we’re built on living stone, they are sleek yet filigree, architectural marvels, impossible to tell that they’re hollow until holding one in hand.

(Continuing on this theme of breakage:) Bones heal but one still can feel a fracture, years after, when the weather shifts.  I carry rain like a heaviness, really, it’s fluid mechanics: even in our hardest places, there’s room for expansion.

Hot tea on a warm morning; the morning breaks, slowly. This mug is chipped, some rustic clay, hand-painted in Mexico.  A cartoon humpback hovers over an azure ocean, laid down cleanly in one brush-stroke. Beside El Arco de Cabo San Lucas, thin thoughts of birds fly in front of a lacquered orange sun. If drawn with beaks they might intone truth is beauty, but out of the mouth of these birds more likely a complaint: the heavy […]