The Graveyard Lives Inside You

You taste bone in each sip of water. News- print, bits of the previous century, straw, musk.

Those who did or didn’t make a sound when they died, who whimpered, who trumpeted, who hit the road jack, who refused to go gently, day or night; those

whose eyes shot forth, whose pores cried blood, phlegm, urea, whose guillotined heads flew, whose sponge fed the mad cow, whose heart kissed a bullet, whose lips turned black.

You know it as Infinite dusk.

Paper Oranges

You’re trapped in the cage, the weather, life, against you: sleet’s ermine shawl, groundhogs making meat of your pumpkin. It’s defeat everywhere you look: lean muskrat gardens, graveyards of mangled sinks and telephones. Not once, but twice, you mistook your son for an iPod.

You’re desperate to believe in God but what inhabits you, locked behind a chain-link fence is the blinkety-blank road, the same slovenly dog mutating into something bigger and uglier each day hoarding the inadequate light.

You long to wake up just once with an original thought in your head, an image, some beautiful impossibility

: paper oranges.

My Tahiti

I’ll know when to pack up and call it a life. Plumbing the depths of my January cocoon I’ll do it in style, in my best summer whites. Don’t expect it to be on Saturday night, it might be midweek, say Tuesday in a raging snowstorm. Instinct will tell me the time has come to put it away in the bottom drawer with my winter wools. A bright blue package will arrive with an invitation to comb the dumpster for my island paradise– ferns and wild banana trees, beatnik fauna. Coconuts growing sideways beneath the lucid stars. I’ll pour a flute of pomegranate wine, watch Casablanca one last time. The room floating, the mind bathed in Gauguin’s aquarium light.

On the runway, a plane will be waiting.

Point of No Return

You’re at that point on the journey, familiarity waning with every click of the speedometer. You no longer know which negligible pile of brick is actually your old house. It could take days to find your way back, despite the elastic light. The spaniel you left pattering in the sprinkler might as well be dead for all he remembers you. It takes all your effort just to call him, and even then, his name catches in your throat like a small burr, gets belligerent with the wind, jousting a little before getting sucked under your Michelins. Through the rearview mirror, you’re suddenly aware of firewood jumping off your truck, a couple of grey canisters, your old man’s tackle. You don’t even care that you are swerving. What was once a dot on the map is now less than an afterthought, a box of spare parts banging together in the dark: your neglected porch swing, a moth angry with its lightbulb. Right now, the instant is all you know: the sun breaking out up ahead, contented fieldstone. An elm in the distance, springing new growth. The secret is not looking back.