On main street in Sharpsburg
the man who always sits outside
is in his usual place,
and I wave to him on the drive home.
After eating in the sun, and the books
and the pet store. My sister and I
talk about it and I tell white lies
on the phone. About how I’m still
coming to Utah and how I’ve found
a place to live, but I can’t go there yet –
the truth, but slant. I keep hoping
I’ll know what to do on Monday.
It’s spring, and I mark the time
by the dead deer with necks twisted back
lining the sides of the roads. Since yesterday,
the ugly parts stand out more.

Tonight I went to the river
to visit my friends and help them
make a campfire. Something I’ve always
been good at – arranging sticks,
even green ones, so they go up in flames.
We toast marshmallows and I sit close
to the ground, so my face is hot.
They leave for a little while, and I watch
the flames spread alone and listen
to the spring peepers. In the creek beside
the river they are deafening, and I want
to cover my ears on the walk back to my car.
But I leave them be, and let the cries pour in –
I know what it’s like, to be small,
to want to make noise in the world.

Luke finds the head of a rabbit
in the backyard – he carries it
in his huge jaws, swallows it whole
until he spits it out again at my feet.
I see its black eyes and matted fur
and the red, wet inside of its throat.
Luke watches me, to see what I will do
but I cannot move. So he takes the rabbit
head again, closes his mouth around it.
He stares at me, like this is our own private
secret, this dead thing he carries.
I want to grab his face, force about his teeth
and bury that severed head deep in the ground.
But what would that teach him?

I stretch out Thursday afternoon
until it is see-through at the edges.
I talked to so many people today
and all of them chanted: go west
but maybe that’s not what’s best for me.
Down south is crawling with ***** whispers
and I want to pull them out of the ground
and rinse them clean. Like vegetables
spread out on the kitchen table
in late September: orange and purple
and the scent of soil heavy
by the open windows.

At my aunt’s house,
as a kid, the mudroom was my favorite place -
transition point between low-ceilinged
dark and quiet inside space
and the impossible Vermont sky,
the chickens and the garden
and grass that sloped down to a valley
the size of my child fist. Sometimes in the evening
we’d see coyotes creep from the shadows
of the trees down below, or hear the foxes cry.
We would hike up the gravel road
and climb the mountain before the sun set,
scramble back down in the dusk.
I wish I remembered more
than just picking grass and slowly
splitting it into strips, to learn the way
my hands were capable of deconstructing.
But it came in useful later,
when we went into the woods
to strip the birch trees of their bark:
the best kindling for fire.

So smoke rises and chases us.
To keep the smoke away,
my aunt says, you have to think
about white rabbits. Little
does she know - my ideas
are always half-baked or burnt.
Never the way they should be.
So I do what I think I hear her say –
and I think about white rabbits,
covered in mud.

Last minute words:
the sun dips low
in the sky over
the brown Potomac –
wind drives the current
backwards until the water
is so still. We talk
about fish sleeping
at the bottom of the river.
I let my fingers dip
into the water
when no one is looking.
The molecules part
around my fingers –
so cold, so sweet.

Sometimes I think I can get through anything.
Wrong again – except, I made it to the city
with my patience still intact. I liked the early morning
best, deer in the wheat and crows in the corn.
Midday the sky turned blue and warm wind
rolled over the Ohio hills,
but I was too sick in the backseat to notice.
No matter. Indiana gas station as the clouds
start to roll in. Here the land is flat
and brown and empty. The sky
comes down to touch the earth and everything
goes gray. Finally I’m behind the wheel
and I wish it had been like this the whole way.
I can go fast on the highway and it feels
like traveling back in time, cruising in reverse
the way we came back from Utah years ago.
When the heavens open I’m not scared –
I’ve met god before, just like this – Midwest
melody of rain against the pavement,
or just the song of shutting eyes.

2.
But I didn’t sleep last night. I was too busy
thinking about all the songs I’ve forgotten.
When you’re old, music is supposed to help
you meet yourself again for the first time.
I wish that could happen now – so I pick songs
that matter. Missouri is warm and windy
and it takes all day before I can escape. The arch,
the Mississippi – portrait of a city
that I know must be so ugly on the inside.
Or maybe I like it here. I read O’Hara
in the hotel room alone – I don’t have words
to fill a city that way. The din of beautiful comfort
resonates within this bubble – I stay back,
linger by myself.

3.
What a long day – it’s only 10 in the morning
when Katharine convinces me to fly back.
So I picked out all those songs for nothing –
oh well. It’s not the first time
I’ve done something in vain. Puddles standing
on the sidewalks – it doesn’t matter
if my shoes stay dry. I am guilty
of the default answer – I don’t really want
to hear the question, I just want my voice
to be the most important sound in the room.
At the same time, I don’t like to be the center
of attention – I dissolve to the edges,
wait until I can slip through the cracks unnoticed.
Later we bond about Thursday’s drive –
how we were both afraid, but didn’t want to say it.
I can’t keep my eyes open on the plane,
but I also can’t sleep. Dusk comes faster
than it’s supposed to – we miss an hour.
On the tarmac in Virginia the wind is dry and hot –
it’s too warm for March, and I don’t know what
to make of it. I wait on a bench for my friends
and beside me, a woman cries, but I don’t say anything.
I’m always at a loss for words around strangers.
On the hour ride home we try to figure it out –
what we’re each saying in our coded conversations.
All weekend I heard words, but never the right ones –
for all the intricacies of human language,
it’s insurmountably difficult to tell you how I feel.

4.
So I’m not in St. Louis anymore –
but for the sake of consistency, let’s pretend.
I could have ridden back with the twins today,
flat farms giving way to the rolling hills of the east again.
Maybe that’s why today feels like an undeveloped dream –
I only have one side of what should be a full circle.
At the farmers’ market we eat jams and chocolate,
and Michelle pets every dog. The air is cold and sweet –
I notice the hint of green around the edges of the trees,
the bright yellow of forsythia and the crocuses.
We’ve arrived at the in-between: soon, I won’t remember
winter, but I have a feeling that what has followed me
the last few months might stick around.

1.
Rolling down to Virginia
in a gray shuttle – the rain
cascades off the windows.
I close my eyes but I can’t sleep.
I don’t know anyone here
well enough to be that kind
of comfortable. We reach the bay bridge
but the fog is so thick it’s like we’re suspended,
or we never left the ground to begin with –
no water beneath this bridge.
It isn’t raining in Wachapreague,
for now, the wind is cold
and it blows the clouds away.
If I shield my eyes to the sun
I can see way out past the tidal creeks
and the salt grass – out to the Atlantic.
Later, rain comes in waves –
we cook dinner and joke about ghosts,
and I wonder how many of my own
I brought here with me.

2.
What a privilege to own a boat –
to be your own captain, or even
just to know the waves. The sun is brilliant
but the wind burns cold – before the end
of the day, my nose and cheeks
are lobster-red. It’s so easy to get lost
in the tidal creeks – just acres and acres
of spartina, flat and brown now
but six feet tall in the summertime.
We dredge up creatures from the bottom –
***** and worms and sea slugs.
We eat lunch on a graveyard of shells –
I find the empty husks of horseshoe *****.
Eagles and oyster catchers watch us pass
sit tight on similar whitewashed mounds
of expired homes. The sun is low
when we reach the mudflats –
here the earth is shallow. Seven ways
to catch a clam, but I only know one –
to look for holes that bubble. I fill
my pockets with the dark misshapen
creatures. Sometimes the holes
rush full of water before I can even see
what I dug up. Soon the tide will come back
and swallow the wet sand again.
I want to stay put, watch the muddy water come
learn to filter through it
like the oysters and the clams.

3.
Early morning on the bayside –
wind, more brutal than yesterday
beats the surface until the waves
are whitecaps, and the skiff pitches.
We go back to the tidal creeks,
where the trees block the wind
and the sun illuminates the muddy water.
We watch an osprey glide and dive for fish.
Back in the lab, isolated in white
I see strange animals. For hours
we look for answers to the simplest
of questions: what is this?
Some creatures we toss back
and some we wrap in clear plastic bags.

4.
The long ride home –
half between sleeping and waking
drenched in sunlight. I’m small,
or trying to be – conserving space
wherever I can. I eat my fill of ginger snaps.
The bay bridge is crystal clear this morning
and it gives me a strange feeling, deep
in my stomach – somewhere between
excitement and dread, a fear
or a nod toward what’s coming –
a mystery, creeping in and unfurling
like when I was a kid, awake too late at night
feeling dumb, for hoping, for wanting,
and most of all, for not yet knowing.

Fluorescent light flickering in the library
gives me a headache. I should read
but I’d rather let my head be empty.
We had a long conversation this morning,
and cried – she said, “yeah, you’re young”
and “yeah, your parents are getting older.”
Do all you can and hope for the best –
I keep feeling like I’ve walked off the bridge
inadequately prepared. Like I did that summer
in Ohio – we counted down, to keep each other honest.
Hit the cold brown water and came up gasping –
at least then I had a friend. Or the in between –
we could have been in love, two Octobers ago.
If I had opened my mouth sooner.
This morning I said “what should I do
when the one truth about myself
that I’ve always believed falls through?”
No easy answer – I’m just changing again,
shedding skin. Diana says “look at you –
doing everything I’ve always dreamed of.”
Only I don’t feel so lucky. I want to go back underground,
filter soil to the bottom of my tongue.
Stutter of a heart that’s half homesick, half escapist.
I haven’t even left yet, but an hour
isn’t enough time to spill out the last three weeks.
Like rallying the home team, everyone is wearing
my colors, except if I look too fast
it’s all just black and white.