Florida,
when it was known to me,
was a long land of strip malls and palm trees.
A long land of asphalt roadways and people
waiting on something
they pretended was not death.
The cast-aways of a culture that could not
strap their useless to a tree and leave them.

You could hear them in the grocery stores,
the thin lines of sweat beaded together
to crouch in the wrinkles of their flesh.
You could watch them in traffic,
sifting to the side like *******,
collecting itself and slowing down to naught.

It was not a happy place.
the sun reflecting in painted posters
and painted smiles, convincing those
who were not there.
Cold drove them down en masse,
large four-lane-highway flocks of them,
with winter adverts that lingered on
snowed-in, New England cable televisions,
telling of a thing that did not exist.

Florida,
when it was known to me,
was a land of dark, high-waisted palms
lining roads thick with *******,
asphalt glowing in its heat-induced mirage.
everything seeming off, distant,
everything somewhere else.

You could walk along the pavement,
feeling your feet echo upward from your
shoe-soles, watching the white-haired movement
of traffic, and almost remember
everything the world had ever thrown away.

An abandoned amusement park,
the ruins of a funhouse,
mirrors cloudy and thick with soot.
Stare at the various reflections:
warped and distorted
to gross effect, like entryways into
equal and opposite pasts.

Do you remember the way
the smiles used to rise up
from the glass and echo
against the translucent light?
Some distant tinny laughter
brings you into daylight:
a chirping bird, a memory,
a rusted bell shaking
against the fog.

I think I'd like to write something once
that isn't bent and weighed down
with sand.
See where it sits and pours,
over and upward and outward
away from me.
A career of sand.
The grains sit and fill-in
spaces between the keys,
eating up the page
and the words, and the years,
and the tips of callous fingers:
all of it sand.


Textures sift between hands,
a warm roughness beneath
un-blanketed backs.
Turn it over in the picture frame.
A memory that won’t part from
the foreground,
won’t erase itself from the
desert it mires in.

The shower-head of time
refusing to scour the hands,
backs, fingertips, a keyboard
against an empty page.
All of it sand–
lone and level,
far as the eye can see.

They flit like pages or old ghosts
through the dark spaces of your mind,
front to back like a laundry lists of good
memories gilded and soured
both-- by time and retrospect.
They come in little images like behind
the big, blue trash cans on the playground
where Marie kissed you
and you ran away.
The leather seats of
her father's car where McKinley
undressed herself that first time,
belt buckle taut against you hip.

All of them like snapshots
blending upward and forward
toward you until the recent,
fresh and inflamed as if the skin
of some rotten, festered wound.
How you see her here,
sitting there across the
edge of the bed
a million miles away.  
She is salvation if only you can grab her,
but you cannot anymore.
See her in dark hair, tied loosely
back behind her.
See her in anger at the turn of her lip,
sweet flesh-- even as the words sour.
See her in reflections of light
softening her eye against the welling tear
she dares to fall.

Torn-out pages of scripture.
Sad beautiful ghosts that,
if not dead, are far
from here--

And what ought love to do
from a thousand miles
but die.

Sometimes you find that it is gone,
and you look
and you think
and you feel
that it is gone.

And, gone from it, you can
breathe again— as if soft hands
pressed tightly to a neck
were relieved— the breath
comes freely and often
but irritated skin rubs
red, inflamed memories
playing out

like diamonds on some
bruised necklace:
hurts less, less, less,
never fades.

All of this is something it shouldn't be:
A scar across the stomach,
a sound heard in a silent place,
us seated here, unlucky / oblivious /
hopeful all the same that perhaps

you and I— how curious, fate!—
might be the solution
each and every one of us is
looking for,

even as another
tear pauses to rest, just ever slightly
for a moment, along the dark
skin above your jaw.

The night we left the dance and,
drunk, lay in heat across forbidden beds.
A tangle of suit jacket and black cloth,
kissing secrets in our thick
darkness-dream, a tightening shadow,
something like arms
that never quite held you up
but— knowing they never will—
wrapped around you all the same.

Thin straps of a dress
slide to pale arms and sitting,
shivering, and saying nothing,
except perhaps an offered smile
as I pulled my jacket to your shoulders.

How beautiful the world might
be if it was you!
Your little shoulders, your little sounds,
dark eyes alight with excitement,
dark hair as it falls then in front
of a face too solemn for twenty—
only to be brushed away again.