Longlands

I want to think it was love

of the kind you are afraid to touch

the life I had built and torn apart

a life that now moves through me like rain

& what's left of the year is already gone

~

The field is ignited with summer, the city would be burning if we could see it from here. The blues in our eyes, the evening's sea of fireflies. White wicker benches and the colored bottles in the foyer. The piles of shale we hurled like grenades into the warm maw of night. The voice of someone I was used to.

~

at the bottom of the island the sand sings

a memory effervesces and we're drifting

inexorably toward the gutted cars by the overpass

snatching up baby turtles with our oars

from the clairvoyant blackness

the bumping of kayaks burnished by laughter

~

I never told her what I felt

I had loved her already a lifetime ago

I like to think she knew

~

& in these memories, it's here

that I'll never have to know how it happened

you, vomiting atop the hospital roof

regretting the reflex, the horizon suddenly gone

tears raining over the dial tone

mother singing to you in half-sleep

how it now falls to the page soundlessly

those hours before you became a season

~

Time machines will be built by rage, the kind that nourishes the soul before burning down the house. There's an escape, a little decade just wide enough for us to slip through. If we make it back I'll name a constellation after you. Just take my hand. I'm so sorry I wasn't there, it was for a languid love I didn't have to erase myself into.

~

If I could just remember everything

I'll never have to know the magma

unexpressed, unrequited

an unlived universe

our memories drawn in the sand

near the eddies of the slipstream

& in twenty years the puppy curled on my lap

would persist longer than your voice

The voice I still hear when I play cards

~

I didn't mean to lose my way back, but there is still a lighthouse. Some nights, you are the lighthouse. Returning from the corners of summer, I just wanted to climb the spiral stairs, cup her face, kiss her forehead, and tell her thank you. I was always here. That's all I ever wanted to be. Forgive me.

~

but still I tear myself apart

looking for a summer token, some relic

to give back into the river's surface

a river whose banks will never meet

a barnacled pike twisted away from the foundered

warships off to the north of the island

the one I carried for two decades

in the crux of my chest

~

It's Christmas again, and there's eggnog spilling from red solo cups, greasy plates and woozy laughter. Meatballs that taste like marinara and grape jam. The rooms are cozy, easily mistaken for your own childhood. You were born because nobody else was coming. Nobody else would do. You won't learn to say this for twenty years.

~

The evening is revoked in the clatter of closing doors

wheeled hospital beds and sterile lighting

as if nothing were going to come

cupid's paintbrush breaks up through barren volcanic rock

salt-spray rewetting & smearing the ashes

embedded in adolescent dreams

~

Don't worry. The future is so far ahead it's already behind you. Tripwire of a mind neglecting the pangs of the body, in the futile pursuit of immortality. Don't be afraid for what isn't here yet. It was planted on the hillside long before you were born, waiting. It is waiting still. The rapture isn't what we thought. Suddenly weightless and longing towards the inexorable.

~

There is so much I need to tell you.

In time we are beaten into radical honesty.

You will learn the purpose of "forgive me."

The bullet comes to rest only after speaking.

You will forget your own name, only by heart.

In those dreams illuminated by snow & smudged ink you're still alive

You are the season we passed through to get here.