House by the Sea
Winter sun shining silver
touch my black boots, my blue jeans,
all my piercings, my leather gloves,
and this poem.
Light these lines of whitecaps.
Light these lines of empty sand.
Burn my eyes bright and show me in
the snowflakes falling into the waves
water becoming other water
again.
Evergreens. Garbage cans tied with
yellow cords under a greasy tarpaulin.
Splintered deckboards, rusty house numbers.
An empty mailbox shaped like a whale.
We came here, some Summers ago,
like immigrants.
Time like a sea.
Time like the gulls
flying in white circles.
Time like the soapy windows
of an abandoned telephone booth.
Friends! We had so many friends!
Cascades of friends. Bushels of friends.
The wine and the talk,
the good food and the roaring laughter,
the long poems and the sad songs,
the bad beach books and the sex in unusual rooms.
The sex creeping through the cedar boards.
The sex seeping through the ceilings and the floors.
An empty gin bottle and upturned
bottle caps in the sink. Rolling papers.
Dry lime slices on the countertops.
Pretzel knots. Chip bags. Matchbooks.
Pizza boxes and beer cans. Cigarettes
piling out of ashtrays like cornucopias.
Baseball on the radio.
My papers on the tabletops. Books open to particular pages.
Maps of battles. Cash in small bills. Glasses of icewater,
sand between my toes and my legs brown and ropy.
Dawn swims. Slipping on the jetties, gashing my knees.
You licked the sun from my bare shoulders like cream.
At night in our bed the sheets in the breeze
puffed above our brown bodies like sails.
You the goddess of rentals,
your hands against the porch rail at dusk, at dawn.
Salt in your long hair,
smoking clove cigarettes on the sand,
frightened of the jellyfish.
You the goddess of skin like hot bread.
No clothes for you.
Not for weeks.
At night by porchlight the women
would sprint to the dark water,
bare breasts, bare bottoms bouncy and pale.
Splashes in the warm water.
The slurp of the waves.
In the dark I lost my watch.
She was like a boardgame: flat, cornered, competitive.
Face like a fox. Her red hair. Her fluffy tail.
Spaghetti and swimming and cheap merlot.
A tub of ice cream and paper tumblers of whiskey
with orange slices on the waxed rims.
Her thin and pink lips against
the crisp paper tab cut with toenail scissors.
Her thin pink lips against your thick red lips, against
your bare brown shoulders.
Her thin pink lips against my dry red lips, against
my bare brown shoulders.
You the goddess of kisses like Christmas.
You the goddess of thighs and long hair.
You the goddess come to rape mortals
as a swan by the seashore.
Holding six hands
under the sheets puffed like sails
we hung on to one another and waited
for our resurrection.
We were delivered
thirsty as cats and inches thinner,
into a shining Sunday morning
silver with a dawn rain.
Three days later we left.
Packets of unmailed letters.
A can of tomato sauce in a paper bag.
Dishes in the dish drainer, under the window,
next to the sink.
Back over the bridge on the highway
we stopped for hamburgers.
The rain settled in, low clouds like a shroud
over the island, over our house by the sea.
We were uncomfortable in so many clothes,
so lonely for each other already.
The coolness of the day
wormed its way into our food.
On the highway you cried.
Within a year
you were gone.
Our friends, our music,
our poems, our wine,
our girl with red red hair,
our weeks by the water
all gone.
Gone for years now,
gone for a lifetime
by your short count.
The pizza joints and the arcades,
the surf shops and the bakeries
are all closed for the season, and
a police car slows to watch me walking
along a sandy street, under evergreens,
past a boat upside-down under
a greasy tarpaulin
tied with yellow cords.
Winter sun warm me
this cold morning,
as the dark clouds come to shore.
Burn my eyes bright and show me in
the snowflakes falling into the waves
water becoming other water
again.
Copyright © Christopher Miller 2004
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