Two weeks before summer you left.

I bleached my hair and thoughts

while you were away

I grew tired, impatient on my own.

A month later, I met someone new

I thought he was nice and

smart, I let him take your place

and do the things that were yours to do

because if I had gotten him flowers

he would not have left

them in my room and told me

they would die

in his.

Twelve months before,
and for seventeen years before that,

I dreamt of traveling south.
By plane or ship , it did not matter.

I lived to leave the days without light
and animals below dead grass,

skin like desiccated bone.
And the naked trees

still did not seem as bare as I-
and then I could be happy.

Half a year ago I packed my car and headed south
where the ground was always blue or green

and never white and never brown;
where you could smoke and swim outside

and the trees wore colors all year.
Here was beautiful but it didn’t mean a thing.

Two months ago I packed my car and headed north
and everything looked different now.

And once life begins to bloom
and sunshine stencils through my bedroom window

and lace dresses crawl finally from drawer to skin
I will not have minded the wait

Her days are gray watercolor, pale on thin paper.
It has soaked through into soft, lumpy creases
like the lines on her forehead or cream left in sun.

She is a toy train left running on its endless metal loop,
hollow breaths without inhale, moving without movement.
Fuel and track are here, but the conductor has fallen asleep.

Her thoughts blend like nectar on honey-comb walls,
the impatient drip still not enough to push her from the hive.
In this golden opposition, she watches earth dance without her.

What could pull her out like the pit out of a plum
was not hoping, nor was it medicine or error.
She was lost in an open sea, red bricks tied to her ankles.

But chains may loosen in the bright white of baby, challenged
by new life in peril. It is her time to fail wholly, to surrender,
forever choosing absence over presence, shallow over deep.

Or it is her time to look at what she has lost;
husband, independence, her life. Ten years of stale air
has finally split her open, fully agape at the seams.

In a burst of concentrated ignorance and esteem
she has acted, she has won. As if guided by Divine hands,
gray has peeled away. Dress her in pinks, yellows, greens.

The horizon hung coated with evaporated sea salt,
a buttery rosewood sun dipped like quicksand
until it dissolved. Alka-Seltzer into foamy crests
atop the antique sea beneath

The sunset fell like a pinball until it reached a place to rest
miles below. It landed with a deep bellowing bass
felt in the spines of every being with a pulse

Until the water rose in braided mounds, navy and silver,
cracking heavy splattered warnings in the air like
chalk-dust on a clean blackboard or oily fingerprints
on crystal chandeliers, as if to say tomorrow.

When tomorrow came, Earth held its breath
as if bandaged tightly, protected in a giant net.
And although every organism capable of movement was in motion,
every set of eyes could not help but stick to the sight
of a shifting universe.

In a single blink, the whistling knot of dust and rock
split the sky wide open before cracking fiery into the Gulf.
Ripped open at the seams, the bright became black

And that was how it would stay as pupils constricted for the last time,
no one knew whether the dark was from the dense, leaking ashes
or from millions of scrambling feet on the dusty ground
running in neither direction, in every direction,
although everyone knew by now there was no more direction.

As it goes, their existence would become no more than a theory.
Their first footprints in the dewy clay moss
would become no more than a hunch,
and all anybody really says is that nobody really knows.