Love is a lazy river.
Love is a tight pair of jeans.
Love is the passing of a cool canteen
in the shade of a breezy willow tree.
Love is one cigarette lighting another.
Love is in tell-tale signs, last call, or a thunderstorm in autumn.
Love is a crack inching its way across the windshield.
Love is North Dakota, seen through the bedroom window of a beautiful girl.
Love is a parent choosing their child over God.
Love is the epilogue.
You let me talk on end till I sober up
enough to ask the important questions
like whether or not beauty is at its best
deliberate or accidental (the look on your
face suggesting one of us must be stranded
on shore) and I ask because I don’t think
your god deserves credit for sunsets, or
walk-off home runs, or something your
parents did together in attempt to keep
the magic going – a process they were
told not to enjoy too much.
This bar is lit year-round with Christmas lights
reflecting off the varnished oak, drinking glasses,
and liquor stock, and a dozen little tiki lamps
sporadically glow from their stationed posts;
an aura not unlike votive candles flickering
at the feet of the Blessed Virgin.
I’m redefining what it means to sit here
in the dark. It’s a shame they won’t be
talking about this in the next century:
the way he pronounced vacuous when
asked to describe the room, or the shot-glass
clank tuned in perfect collective pitch.
It’ll either be too hot or too cold by then,
and reading will be as ancient as laugh tracks
and patriotic cowboys, Monument Valley
now a beatific dementia that rises with
Abbadon and sets with Big Sur.
But I’m not thinking about that right now.
I’m thinking about you, whoever you are,
wrapped carelessly in a coral, melon-white
Mexican blanket on Zuma Beach with your
back to me, and whether or not it’s really been
ten years since I’ve seen the ocean.
Originally published in Sugar House Review: Fall/Winter 2018
Leaving the marina, the blue heron stands
at the rock island tip and stretches toward blue
sky, focused on the water’s surface and what might
exist beneath, like a patron saint of silverfish or
shipwrecks. Its wings unfold and shade the water and
as we pass I wonder whether to pray to the bird or
bribe with bluegill. I lay back under the blazing sun and
cross my arms, hand feed cigarette butts to dented beer cans,
wave at passing boats like I’m running for office.
Anchored near shore we unload the boat
for lunch in the shade of a thinning dogwood,
intoxicated off one another, or sunstroke.
Deer tracks map between trees and naked roots
before they disappear further inland.
She laughs at something I said and for a moment I imagine
the gentle algorithm it would take to hold her hand.
Barefoot on the rocks, it’s hard not to
believe all this was made for you and me.
Later in the middle of the lake the boys bob like buoys
as the girls pull at their swimsuits, connect thread to tanline
with white and pink borders like European boundaries;
parts of the world I’ll never see. I watch the shoreline
for another heron, the patron saint
of wardrobe malfunctions.
Originally appeared in The 3288 Review: Winter 2017.
Before red and purple arrangements
illuminate our faces in the cerulean sky,
before a fountain of sparks shower the sidewalk,
before the smell of black powder, before
thunderstorms cool the night in ways
reserved for golden months, she asks me
how I’m doing when I arrive, and after
thinking it over a moment, I tell her much
better now. She asks if I had a rough day
and I think no, not really, I mean better now
that I’m here, breathing your air, and that
you’re you and nobody else is.
Evening Panoply 