Poetry

between waves woven
so tight they bury the
wreckage,

trust the current to breathe
you to the surface

& catch the breath in the split
second between breaks
before

brine heaves
let the salt sting,

a sky so swollen
asphyxiates, let the wind
out of your lungs

let it wail,
hammer against the bluffs,
the ocean has never been afraid
to rage.

My nine-year-old asks about the dark sides,
sides not easily seen, and if they cannot be seen
do they exit. I feel I am about to enter a black hole.

Before answering I imagine asking this
of my own father, if he saw the other sides
of his son. If he bothered to look.

With internet help my son learns a myriagon
has 10,000 sides, a megagon has one billion,
and how an apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite

number of sides. Imagine that, he says.
And I do, confirming the geometry of my youth
and numbered days as an incomplete theorem,

wholly incongruent. Then he asks what form has
the most complex or interesting sides. I know this
as if were etched into my skin: The human form.

But I say – I don’t know. It is his problem to solve
now, to look with intent for complexities in things
appearing deceivingly simple and one dimensional.

I thought I was lucky
impervious but salt eats
away at everything eventually and

the sandstone bluffs collapse and
twenty-nine is a landslide after heavy
rain

 a total loss the cliff 

can’t rebuild but it can erode
into something
new like the sand
I am breaking

away from the rock
I was cut from

Snowfall’s white descent is piling up, uninterrupted,
in layers of soft milk-chalk, as if this is its burdensome
intent, to lay rule over a silenced city.

Snowflake: not the modern fragile sense, but as perfect
crystallization, the sum of every shade of color,
each one as wholly unique.

Children on the PS 118 playground know this,
know that snow is an invitation, a communal call
that bestows no rules.

A snowman gets built, rolled through dirt and debris,
patted down with wet and snot-smeared mittens.
His dirty, rock-coal eyes wink to their delight;

a smile of stones follows. A child pulls a button
from her thrift-store coat, offering what she can
to make things whole.

the lamp is my new favorite
it’s brass
and the whole thing gets hot when it’s been on awhile
and the lights bend and move
and it’s perfect next to the pull out bed by the fireplace

and it reminds me of the ones
in my grandparents’ house in hendersonville
where squirrels come to the porch for walnuts
where sometimes, reading in the green chair,
you can see a black bear roaming
where my sister and I used to sprint
without abandon down the golf course hill
in our swim suits while the sprinklers ran

back when catching fireflies in jars
and looking for frogs with flashlights after dark
was enough
I found one that still had a tail, once
not a tadpole, but not fully a frog

caught between one thing
and the other.

She jogs the empty corner of the shopping center lot,
where barberries catch the dead leaves.

The wind fills her Buzz Lightyear coat,
thrashing and dingy at the elbow.

The bus hulks against the wind.
She stops and eyebrows my truck

when I wave her across. She grins like the boy
in the shopping cart I saw an hour ago,

in his own Buzz shirt, grin full of stars
at the galaxy he was discovering,

the world slow as understanding. The woman in the lot
already knows what it means to miss

the bus, to be late, to dare to run in front of a car
when you cannot see the driver, your hair a tangle

in a wind that, outside of any car, only you can feel.
The three-finger wave I give is barely visible

above the steering wheel, a hand
of threat and grace, which she won’t know

without that first step. She jogs the crosswalk, the bus
heaves and hisses, its windows reflecting her arms

and shoulders, her face watching the ground,
where the wind shoves leaves in every direction.