Lines Written on a Key Largo Bridge

Your shirt shone moon-white
on a night without moon
(we’d seen the stars rise instead)
and the gray in your hair fluttered
like fishing lines hooking the wind.

I hummed a song you didn’t know
as we ran our feet through the surf,
and even for the time of year,
the warmth of the waves surprised us.

But you didn’t touch me until later,
when we sat on the bridge,
and only then to point out a distant freighter.

“We would have missed it,” you whispered,
“had there been brighter lights in the sky.”

I looked, and felt self-conscious –
the ship shining
its obviousness so vainly
on the horizon.

You wouldn’t let me hold you.

I drifted then, buoyed through the night and stars,
everything departing and you
becoming a distant shore.
Only the smell of the sea grass
reminded me that I, not the ship,
was the land-bound, fixed point.

We stayed until sunrise
and drove the car home slowly.
You were afraid we’d crush crabs
blinded by the morning.

Border patrol

He raps his nail against her rooted tooth

Wipes the slime that gleams along her gums.

Bloody lace surrounding lacy blue

Where the eye rebounds against his thumb.

Quit, she says, you're making all the scenery shift–

But could there really be another dream,

Besides a woman-wearing thought in his?

Its own incoming light and faulty wings

Close-behinds and, buried under oceans

Evils held in place with incantations:

Certain words there are which can't be spoken,

And he is clumsy, clueless, lousy with impatience.

But oh if she could know the dream he draws her skin across:

His unhopelessness is a pessimist, her sighs like fragrant songs. 

On Feeling Tired

I’ve grown tired.

Veins, and cartilage, and unknown cells
quivering with the fatigue I’ve taken
upon myself.

Even the days grow tired with me -
birds singing carelessly for neither
pleasure nor doom … but for silence, and a moment’s rest.


Picture by Sarah Folkman

Evening at Applebee's

"And this," you said, "long beach at Haat Plaa Muk,"

Blond of your brown right hand becoming that damp

And trash-dappled sand in the air above your mug.

"And this home I," pointing at a callous on the puff

Beneath your little finger, probably a place

With nervous chickens and broad fluorescent blossoms

Bobbing in the yard. The light surrounding your face

Is the alien green of the grass on the screen the TV

Looks through to the bar, and about a nautical mile

From the curve of your hand you are carving a double-u reef

Where the cuttlefish teem and the scattering moonflashes pile.

I swam in that water, renewed my interior flesh

Which mixed with that air and that cool and that slippery food

And reverted to gray in the blown static spray of home I had left.

Memories

Quivering fire

Mirrored in a pool of wax

Glows devoid its heat

Despues del adios

Es dura la noche y larga

sin tí,

como vías ancianas de un ferrocarríl.

Y es como un grito vivir la tarde

(algunas con nubes,

algunas rociadas

de sangre);

y al levantarme - mañanas frías,

sol de madrugada -

escucho quejar la espiga,

llorar la guitarra.

Refinery