postcard: on motion

I. A day of warm weather can change everything. I’ve lost entire afternoons to park benches—doing the crossword in the New Yorker, reading Sheila’s Alphabetical Diaries, drinking a cold Diet Coke, and listening to the boys lying in the grass with their mahogany guitars. Thinking of that last year in California and how I had not seen the end coming, despite it always feeling so near. It was early May when the poppies labored to bloom, embers of gold flecked along the burn scars. (And how can we not believe in reincarnation of some kind? When one life begins where another ends, and so on?)

II. “And so on…” I muttered to C., waving away the rest of a sentence and letting the silence say what it needed to. Not wanting to visit the past for too long, knowing how easily I can get stuck there, in the details. In the garden of an apartment near North Calvert and apple pie moonshine on the Susquehanna; the egrets dancing below the bike path, where the Los Angeles river trickles along; powdered ranges after a weepy January, and satin-feathered crows bathing in street puddles at first light. Those quick and wild horses on Assateague Island, galloping through the marshes.

III. Last Thursday, I walked home in the rain, the bottle spun west toward El Matador as I slipped into the empty apartment. I thought of you weeks earlier, after someone looked at me with dark eyes, reminded of the morning you left for Shanghai. How neither of us wanted to part from bed, and I dragged a finger along the constellation of freckles, longing to photograph the early light filtering through the blinds, but not badly enough to spoil the moment. You said, “It’s only three months,” and those months became years, even after you returned to Santa Monica, so I never drove west of Culver again.

IV. “It is so embarrassing to be seen loving something,” I whispered to C. Always met with surprise after confessions made years later and too late. Lately, I’ve taken to running laps around the park until the steady metronome of striking pavement is louder than the monologue. Sydney sings, “Heaven has fast cars and faster horses… Heaven has cigarettes and Coca Cola”. When I. says, “you look like you would be a runner,” I can’t help but laugh. The half of it, the whole of it.

V. And I was so desperate for the divine, it made perfect sense to me that the stitchwork of language could sew meaning into the ordinary. Memorizing the lines of a poem each week and trying to suck the marrow out. I have lingered all these days for Mickey to cast his lure down from the great blue lake, searching for signs the soul endures long after the animal heart breaks its canter. Still hoping to be a good daughter.

VI. On Sunday, after the night grew cold and moonless, I dreamt of the river I grew up on and the milky dogwood. Rolling over as the phoebes sang their dawn chorus from the branches. (Hallelujah.)