Alone in this hotel room
any city could be outside
the muffled lives next door
could be anyone’s lives
the forecast says maybe
a tornado tonight
flooding in the lowlands
even this fails to rouse me
from the crisply-made bed
I am just waiting for a word
my heart laying open
a palm outstretched
(One more for the road, and still no seagulls!)
The tide also ebbs,
this gray slack dawn
taking me to O’Hare,
to the blue line,
the Magnificent Mile–
and yet already,
a distinct impression
of lack.
Although Lake Michigan
is tremendous under
storm clouds—
afloat or from dry land,
it drowns out
the shoreline, the day,
and necessitates
a more pioneering
way, dead reckoning,
finding the wind
and marrying
one’s course to it,
HOLD FAST—
as the deckhand’s
knuckles say,
an attempt to summon
long life and luck
by making hope indelible,
a poet’s trick,
as well—
This may look like the L
or Wabash in the rain
but every word here
is actually your name.
An undertow is a steady
offshore-directed second-order flow,
i.e. it is proportional to
the wave height squared. Meaning:
No wave can arrive completely
without also leaving.
It will always contain
some percentage
of its own opposition,
no matter how it tries
to keep it down.
You are a physicist,
and so of all people
should understand
compensation,
that a wave’s nature
is intrinsically
antagonistic,
and that any assumption
of linear behavior,
at least in this model,
is most likely invalid–
(The ocean poem is dead. Long live the ocean poem!)
Oh what havoc
a hurricane can wreck,
loosing stairs from houses,
houses from stairs, lifting
and carrying away years
of construction
to some arbitrary location
and then burying all the roads.
Of course, the map
is not the territory,
and this is not a poem
about the ocean,
it’s just, this time
I am certain
as a storm surge,
and so also irrevocable—
it’s like Neruda said,
the tide goes no, and then no,
and no, and no, and
yes.
(continuing on with the ocean poems in response to this business–)
You tell me about Oaxaca.
I tell you about the Gulf,
and then we talk
about how we both
almost moved
to Hawaii, once.
Maybe we would have met
there, too, you say,
as we survey the skyline’s tines
from out across the bay.
It’s strange, how language
tries to make distinctions
between bodies
of saltwater–
they all commute,
or aren’t we proof?
Below ships pass port side
to port, red running light
to red. I can hear my blood sing
and if I’m laughing again
it is only for joy
at the freshening breeze,
at how a close-hauled heart
can fall open so easily–
or love, death, or nature in general…
Only five percent
of the ocean floor
is mapped.
The rest is unknown—
a deep subconscious
we crawled out of, once,
and return to
as foreigners,
except for the salt
in our blood,
and like some half
-remembered song,
our strange
capacity for floating—
A neap tide now—
so jealous of the shore
but just think
of how much
ocean never once
touches land
so long
have I endured
this thirst
have hollowed out
and cambered
bones to search
and search
and if I waver
it is only
as a breaker
holds itself
fleetingly
in disbelief
before it falls
like thunder,
and arrives, abruptly, finally—
Another day breaks
like a bone,
dragging me along
to my chagrin–
another night
is gone before
it’s gone, at least
that’s how it felt
on a scale of one to ten,
a ten. It doesn’t help,
this hesitating sky.
The air feels thin,
too brittle to breathe in–
this ossified blue,
it does not move me
to move from rest.
These recalcitrant
breaths do not support it.
I had hoped to watch the sky
fill in with stars, particularly
the obscure ones
reserved for the backcountry
but fell asleep too early,
having spent all night waiting
for night to fall. Even late,
the mountains glowed,
echoing the Northern sun
ringing out across the old
burn zone, new brush rallying
up dry avalanche chutes–
so very little snow this year.
Slowly, the lake receded
into suggestion; an owl
called lowly, both begging
the question. To have
is the first true
prerequisite for want.
The second,
loss.
I saw three stars only
before I slept,
but at three, woke
to a cacophony of light–
the nearly-full moon,
a host of constellations,
such a loud, glad return,
and almost making
an absence tolerable–
Heart, heart,
what did I say?
Oh the moon got into you,
the moon, the sky, the lake—
and then you went
and showed your face,
boldly, no hesitancy,
and so now, we wait—
How vast, this night.
And just like that
I can finally admit,
it isn’t that I fear
your loss—
what terrifies me
most is that
some day
you may be right.
Or some evening,
sitting up late,
like this.
OPTIONAL POETRY 