OPTIONAL POETRY

Thin envelopes are always trouble. (At first I wrote it as envelops). I suppose that is also true, feeling the terse embrace of bad news.

What sinks down must also rise. My garden  is dry, the soaker hosehas sprung a leak.   I’ve almost forgottenthe curve of your  cheek, distinctivewhile smiling, (a cheek of all things?)The garlic has sent out scapes, two radishes are bolting, and all day everyonehas been singing, the strangest thing.Even the workman in the empty apartmentnext door could not  refrain, a few lines of some Spanish pop song that I don’t knowbut now find myself  humming.

Salvation in cartography. The dictates: paper is better, preferably bought at a ramshackle gas station where a grimy kid tries to sell you a rock while you hand her parents cash because the pumps are antique because you are in the middle of California nowhere during a burning season and all the other stations have sealed up their tanks not that you’ve seen any this far out and are a mile away from hitting empty. Arterials, arterioles– […]

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.