Tag Archives: gabriel gadfly

Tonight, after your medicines
capsize you, after you sink
into the churning depths of sleep,
I am going to walk down
to the shore of the sea,
down past the white sand dunes,
down past sandspur and panic
grass, down to the dark wet.

Whatever chemical dreams
you dream, they will comfort you
long enough for me to fall
on my knees, put my head
against the soaking sand
and crash headlong into the surf.

I’m going to open my mouth
as wide as it will go,
and let the ocean rush in.
I’ll drink deep, swallow gallons
and gallons of sea and shells
and galleons rotting under the waves.
All the humpbacked whales
and shark-stuck suckerfish
and the red seahorses, too.

I’ll swallow the Great Barrier Reef
and the Strait of Gibraltar
and every single one
of Sinbad’s Seven Seas,
just to put out the fire
that scorches my brain
everytime I think of you sinking.

I’ll drink the sea dry
to keep you afloat.

I read them,
and then I threw them in the trash,
but make no mistake, I read them.

I swallowed them whole.
I filled my eyes with every word,
I sewed them in patterns
into my flesh of my body,
at night I wake to entertain the ghosts
lounging in my bedroom
with impromptu recitations
of your letters, of your thoughts,
of the shape of you in words

but I could not keep your letters.

I could not let them languish
in a dusty box, fermenting
into poisons in the closet dark.
I could not let them lie in wait,
like coiled paper vipers
ready to strike the hand that strays
too far and stirs the den.

After the storm,
pieces of terracotta
washed up on the shore,
cast off from some
ill-fated freighter or
dashed-to-bits potter’s shop.

We walked along the sand,
picked them up in handfuls
and tried to imagine
what shapes
they might have had
before they were broken.

Vases or bowls
or ancient statues
of a Chinese emperor’s
bodyguards?

Whatever, they are broken
now and they have become
something else entirely.

Detritus, but beautiful
among the glistening seaweed
and the water and the sand.

Sometimes I grow
so tired of speaking
my emotions to you.

I open my mouth
and dust spills out
instead of feelings.

Dust, and the yellow
wings of moths,
and brittle paper,

scrawled over
with riddles that
lack solutions.

I am coughing up
the black twists
of candle wicks,

oil slicks
and crow feathers
and afterbirth

and all the ash
of every forest fire
burning

to show you
how I feel.

We wrote promises to each other
on the backs of our hands,
wrote them with sticks in the sand
of Lake Burton’s shoreline,
wrote them and spoke them
and broke them
effortlessly.

We wore ourselves thin with them,
snapping promises like cables
until they could no longer
hold up our weight
and the suspension bridge
bridging us
came crashing down

and even then
across the chasm and the gulf
we cupped our hands
around our mouths
and shouted promises at each other
until we were too hoarse
to say anything at all.

You buried yourself
up to your neck
in the white Florida sand
and I realized
I wanted
to watch the tide come in.

I have a photo of you,
squinting in bright sundown
next to the big sand castle
we built on Clearwater Beach.

That castle took hours.
It took buckets
full of wet white sand,
and we poured it
and shaped it
into minarets and towers,
arches and battlements
on wide round walls,
until our hands were raw,
our necks burned red

and then the sun went down.

I took a photo of you with our castle,
a snapshot to record our sweat and work
and as the last light sunk into the gulf,
we packed up our things
and you kicked our castle down.