One night you turned and made the piano an ocean,
told me to dive in, but even before you played me
into the taut steel strings of your net, I knew
I'd be lost in the undertow, tossed back and forth,
and somehow, when the current swept my breath away
I'd still find myself thinking in pillow talk,
mouthing: If I could, I would
make these insecurities a bed and
climb inside with you. We'd sew sails
from the skeletons lingering in our upstairs closets,
and maybe one day I'd find
the right words to tell you that
your body is a pond, and I
am a remarkably privileged fish–
I could lose myself in you,
let my lungs fill with water,
close my eyes, and remember
drowning is a fine art-
you've got to do it with grace,
do it so the last trembling bubble
leaves your lips like a love song,
and you sink with limbs outstretched,
and you turn a respectable shade of blue
like the tablets we'd swallow to float,
flotsam with her jetsam,
out to sea.

He asked if I'd stay,
and my silence trapped him
like a mosquito in amber.
The seconds rumbled past, unhurried glaciers,
two hurricanes, a drought, and a war came
and he was still rolling his joints,
tapping on shoulders, asking soldiers for a light.
When the sea rose and flooded the town,
he sat in his swollen armchair
exhaling smoke bubbles,
while parrotfish gnawed at the carpet, and later,
his eyes glazed with a tired sort of expectation
when the manatees swam past
in their solemn triumph over the suburbs,
as if any one of the lumbering sea cows
might come bearing my yes.

One hundred years of solitude
and Marquez still couldn't shut you up,
your words tear down the walls of Macondo,
heckling the Buendías, poking fun at Aureliano
and his golden fishes. The circular history
spins to a halt, and I fold down
the corner of a page, as if closing the book
could save the city built on paper,
on the Formica tabletop
of an old café with a broken clock
A few chapters back,
you were chastising time,
saying one day you'd
crack your watch open,
rearrange the gears, twirl the dials
and steal back from the ticking hands
that steal so much from you. On page 178,
you committed abominations,
spooning sugar into espresso,
and declared your love for Dali because
the man melted time,
didn't care for anything
not molded to the back of a horse.
Cranberry scone finished,
you ruffle the newspaper,
bemoaning the stockbrokers
who grow fat and complacent
on the crumbs of seconds,
chewing chronological cud, you called it,
but you said nothing could ever pin you down,
much less some cheap Timex
on a nylon strap. Cast out of the fourth dimension,
Marquez scribbles graves for the Buendías,
in death, they've forgotten the original sin
and the Colonel forges fish
from the gold fastenings on his casket
ad infinitum.

Average-joe protagonist wipes beer glasses
at the helm of his sports bar, blissfully ignorant
of the imminent laughable tragedy. Clouds circle,
and there's that obligatory radio broadcast,
the one that warns of inclement weather-
rainy, with a chance of Selachimorpha.
You hum the Jaws theme, tracing pickup lines
on the skin of my back, while sharks pour from the sky,
the improbable tornado dropping great whites
on the California shoreline. One arm curled
around my waist, you tickle erratically
until I squirm away, only to creep back again,
and put my head in the mouth of the sand tiger,
wandering too close to the edge of the water, foolish,
but this is a b-movie, we swam out too far
knowing how it would end. The extras
scream and scatter, arms flailing,
going through the motions of surprise,
stumbling in their scripted attempts
to flee the inevitable. Predictably,
they fall. We all fall, and the girl trapped
in the hammerhead's belly
has this peaceful expression,
as if she can't quite remember why
she ran away in the first place.

The café rumbles like the belly of a fasting saint,
voices competing with the clanks of silverware.
In the tearoom a boy with a tangle of wires
leaking from an unzipped backpack
struts between tables, billing himself as a "human hotspot".
He wears the same glasses you do;
they slip down his nose as he leans over to flirt with the waitress
in the red apron, who taps her nails against the cash register
and laughs at his bad jokes, she tells me, because
he wears his pants too high, just like her brother used to.

A man with a soup-stained button down and a bald spot
introduces himself as Peter Ling, proprietor,
oracle of the inner city rummage sale,
advisor to the lost and hungry.
He doles out pithy wisdom and lentils into mismatched bowls-
"You want therapy? Try your ex boyfriend."
The four of us hide our grins, and flee
to his cavernous basement. As we go spelunking
through the puddles left by a burst pipe,
clambering past bloated books and warped furniture,
Emma Miller swears that she slept here once-
on a moldy brown sofa crouched like a hibernating bear
among empty Heineken bottles.

The expedition yields four boxes of acupuncturist leaflets
and a damp antique suitcase filled with seeds,
who seized the opportunity to germinate,
their tiny roots searching fruitlessly
in the mildewed silk lining.
Ling says he's going to try gardening this year,
serve up spaghetti squash grown out back by the garage.

We sowed pea shoots and salad greens
in glass jars pilfered from a claw-footed armoire
that lay on its side, defeated, like the last of the saber-tooths.
I named one for you, tucked Eruca vesicaria sativa
into potting soil, and set it on the balcony railing-
tempting fate and gravity, because you always liked a little excitement
with your afternoon cup of rooibos.
I didn't see the girl who knocked you off your perch,
saw only the sun's sharp gleam off the glass
as the jar plunged, graceful as a slow-motion train wreck
on its arc toward the concrete,
and Peter Ling reached up with his big, calloused hand
to break your fall.

Sleep visits me again, a man
in a grey overcoat, smiling, beckoning.
It's easier than you think, he tells me
just like they say, counting sheep
and stars. There are somnambulists
and the creak of bedsprings, some nights
silence, but more often the clock ticks back
and forth. I sit beside the bed
with its sagging dust ruffle and watch over
the sleep of the living. It's funny,
he says, stifling the lamplight,
especially when they talk, and when they dream.

Disillusioned by the open market,
he polishes his glasses and stretches,
running a hand through hair made artistic
by the blunt scissors of the philosophy major
who lives downstairs. It was a trade,
he tells me. Short back and sides for a batch
of macadamia nut cookies. Barter economy.
He mutters about measured value,
divides a piece of paper, and breaks a pencil
while forcing the verses of quarter sheet poems,
recounting the night he stole four sponges
from a craft supply store in town,
a drunken ****-you to the establishment-
but also, he admits, it was late and
he had to do the dishes.
If you want to see how big the world is,
he says, take off your belt. Now
tighten it to the usual hole, put it down,
and look. You are a speck of dust on
the wineglass of human existence.
Don't let it get to you. You are smaller and better
than you think. Another quarter sheet finished,
he slumps back on the defeated sofa
and reads me Desiderata, putting on airs,
grappling with devotions to poke holes in certainty
just as I do now to the worn leather strap,
shrinking my claim to the wineglass with each punch
of the silver awl, and after years, still waiting
for the clink of his belt buckle,
the moment when, humbled,
he remembers he is only
a child of the universe.