You haven’t noticed
that you are back
where you were born
until we pass a familiar
grocer on the corner.
You tormented the neighbor
boys with toads.
How those summer days still
taste of lemonade
and earth,
and giving it your all.

A hand-print lingers
on the seat
once you have gone.
Clay once shaved in small
amounts from a vase of some kind
now deposited, if not lifted,
from the leather
like an anti-fossil.
I can’t bring myself to clean it.
I rub it like lipstick into
my cheek.

I read my news online now.
And live on a hill.

I travel in time
but not in space.
Like a stone.
A sinking stone
with water like hell
around me,
and a thinking stone
to make it all tragic.
Why must I feel this way,
and why burden you?
I don’t know.

I drink a coffee
with ghosts rising
to tickle my nose.
My baby child having escaped
his crib is silently stacking
blocks.
Each a pixel of color,
a letter of meaning,
and the shape of foundations.
He laughs when the tower is no more.

Music in these times
is useless.
It makes her long for
skipping records again.
Like the scratchy heart beat
in her chest.
The way the arm claws at
a dark worn groove
only to hop back again.

If he could see her now.
Keeping beat
with a loose necklace
bouncing against her chest.
How he would laugh
as she ran
nothing but a silhouette
pressed against
the river banks.
The moonlight
catching on its
cold ink surface.
He always laughed at tragedy
and when she would cry.

She ran
until she saw the bench.
Her old dirty friend.
Falling like a fig into his arms.
Not to cry, but to laugh
and to skip stones
against the worn black
grooves of the river.

I go to point this out,
but her finger is already
dancing. She says
the fireflies are lovely
tonight as they surf
the darkest edges of the city.
How the arms of their swarm
curl like a galaxy
around the gravity
of the old church
at the corner of
State Street.

It spoke in Spanish,
the end of a century
written in words
around its eyes -
its smile. And I
couldn’t speak. An exile -
within myself but outside.

Hands covered in clay
being balled
and spun like the earth.
Seven revolutions and each
revealing 100 secrets.
100 revelations like paint
being removed
to create.

Layers fall away
and a pair of arms
awaken me from my week
of solitude.

She never left the docks -
not by his hands.
He drank beers while
they bobbed in the ocean
by the peer where people walked
to jostle the sand
out of their shorts.

The sun, her large and massive orb,
rested upon the sea
like a pupil rests upon his tears.
The black body bobbing in the currents
as it floats, and in Ben’s hands
a broken rope.