I was older than you called me by my freckles when we met, barely
stretched over the cattails lazily in sweet winds imperceptible usually through
the hot water air
at a parboil

your cigarette-and-sunscreen, cigarette-and-sunshine smell and feel I have you
now as I walk eyes closed down the autumn street
no all smokes do not smell the same, I miss you—

the world in your departure is static for the most
ironic twist of you thought, you thought that I was beautiful
I wasn’t, not while you were watching, not till you
were farther
till I was older, barely

oh if all smokes were you still
if all the suns were you
if I weren’t beautiful and you were looking
oh

in the hot hot hotbox where the
interlude first dug in its feathered heels
(the *******), now, it being
gone with the wind, the wellsprings
reflexively engage because the wind
is hot and here I'm not unused to you yet
and I sure don't miss you but here
I nearly want to

I turned bated breath on my blind eyes and tick
tock
tick
tock
august strode away. august bloated on july and june and
god knows what because august is a bit of an alcoholic,
if you’ll please be discreet about that—we don’t want word to get around

the curtains drawn and folded, I balled my fists and white
knuckled touched chests and abdomens and shoulders but never doors;
somersaults between my ears and over
and over
and over
hardwood against your cranium
you feel it eventually
or I do

and then august screams a marissa-by-the-pool scream but not aloud
and she doesn’t talk to you she doesn’t
talk to you
she’s got nothing to say and you
you
you’ve got nothing to say and

everything is better now it’s so much better
but she doesn’t shake hands for more than a two-count now and
you don’t feel your heartbeat in your ears, usually

to feel the beginning, and end
you take note of how lucky
you are on five hundred threads
and the beer in the fridge on your
parents’ blind-eyed tab
and how just this last time
you can drink coffee before bed
or not come home tonight
or see middle-america with
only your own blessing.

you do not
take note of the broken storm window;
what’s it to you?

I was a creature of spring and autumn; I made no bones about being temperate
even-tempered, even temporary, alive only as many hours daily as the daylight
sinking when the sun sank, sleeping early like a child, sleeping till the dark passed
staying warm under the down until the dawn, where I woke if there was color out the window
but there wasn't always, and on those days I slept.

There was a time that spanned awhile when I thought "alive" to be synonymous with
to not-be-dead, that to die was to stop breathing; to stop living was no different.
I was only alive between the hours that the graveyard gates were open, and even less,
as the grayer days and I never made our acquaintance, as I had made my acquiescence
and my peace with the perpetual proverbial graveyard shift.

I misjudged the patterns of the wind one morning and arose with the milky light
and, tricked by the mild breeze, was caught in a flurry on my long walk. It was cold on my skin
a shock to the system, to my lilywhite hands and my overwarm blood. But my god
it was the most beautiful thing my oft-closed eyes had ever had the pleasure to take in.
And the not-quite sun went down as I watched, and the snowflakes turned to stars, and hung there
weightless, like me, and I was all-at-once electrified and new and I thought childishly
to perhaps stay here for the night, and forever, and watch the seasons change extremely
because it seemed a shame to resist extremity now that I knew the meaning of, and was,
wholly, inextinguishably alive.

the lazy dark curls on her
young shoulders were probably
unkempt and
her young laugh overloud
and her bluefire eyes
a thin veil for her
bursting and unkempt
young heart.

that's probably why he
never wrote back, she realized years later.

I remember my teenaged phantasm and I lace soft boots to draw
tall grass and sand dunes and hothotsummer,
a pair of teenaged lips on my teenaged lips in sundown,
the little wreckage of the family behind walls invisible from distance,
and the perfect quiet of strong teenaged hands, the I-never-want-to-leave only
in that we know so certainly we will
come fall—
the beauty in the shooting of the star
and not the star.

I tilt the rearview, sweater on, and leave to you.
I picture the soft reeds and pebble beach with-you-near-you and I think
how I could take you there and live a baby flame fantasy with a flair
for the dramatics and more fallapart than meets the eye or the mind’s eye, even.

I could kiss you behind clapboards
like goodbye is on the weekend
and cry to Cassiopeia that why-does-good-always-*******-go-away.

But it doesn’t always, not just yet, and so I leave my young Hollywood vision
to my young Hollywood visionary and I take your hand to pass
the quiet sad beach at miles on miles an hour, because I want
you for longer than the starry summer
and Dad’s averted eyes.