Dirt Roads, Detours, Duck Ponds

1.
Arrows. I know you as arrows. I know you as arrows know the air.

2.
Bluebells, baskets of berries, big open spaces,
bees, and tiny blossoms in your mother's backyard.

3.
Come Back from San Francisco on the car radio,
calling from California to say: I can't miss you more, come home.
Think of cattails in the creek and our clever hands under the comforter.

4.
Distanced and drowsy and days apart and disoriented again
by the lights of this dark city. Don't say you didn't warn me.
Don't remind me of dirt roads and detours and duck ponds
at dawn, or the dancing in your room or the dark of mine.
Instead, recall the dumb fights.

5.
Early winter we sneak out to search out snow.
We find Elms and Egrets and mistletoe in the Maple trees
and stories of early childhood. Like, the scent of eucalyptus
for me and eating pebbles for you.

Enough is enough, let's let go of these memories, each
with our own good-bye's, remembering that
endosymbiosis exists, evolution exists, endings exist.
I love you as endings. I love you as endings love the start.

6.
Forget missing me. I won't forget:

Forest fires along the freeway and family drives
and finding feathers everywhere.

A best friend's kitchen far too late, faking sobriety
and late fall's early nightfalls.

I love you as friends love foes,
I love you as--

fruit orchards in September, fallen fruit everywhere,
frozen over lakes, and foot-long grass, and fruit flies,

and falling in the vineyards from running too fast
and following the longest road.

Forget the way I cried in the airport,
saying finally. Forget my fingertips.

7.

Getting on with it.



Going home to grainy wood floors

and a growth chart in the kitchen's doorjamb,

where we dyed eggs the color of gumballs.



What I don't recall, I'll make up:

a grasshopper trapped beneath a glass, geese on

the wallpaper, and a gasp for breath when you touched me.



Gravity exists. And the Grand Canyon and

the Great Lakes and your red guitar.

God, we are bad at forgetting.



Go whichever way I am not.



Remember me by the gold ring you bought and never gave.

Think of grey eyes and goosebumps and

the things only we know and



lakes green with algae and our bodies green, too--

remember geese and small groups of ducks,

your mother's garden and the girls who came before me.



God, we are bad at forgetting.

God, we are bad at forgetting, but good at glances.

God, we are bad at getting this right and keeping our mouths shut--


Don't ask the pilot to turn this jet around.



8.

Have faith. Have open hands and homeward thinking.



Have heroic tendencies and hallelujahs and

drawings of houses on the fridge.



Have pipe dreams of moving to this hardened city and

home cooked meals and hopes of winning me back and

hard rain and pruned fingers.



Remember what they say about hindsight.

Remember that night on the overpass watching headlights

and touching my palm and asking that I stay.

Try to remember the song on the radio--call

late at night and sing to me.



I love you as I love grey herons and hometowns,

fishing without hooks, the lights of

Hollywood, and honey-soaked toast.

I love you as one loves hospital hallways and

hotel room sheets and rented houses by the sea.

I love you as a childhood home--the unfamiliar, the habitual,

the places my hands once touched

when they were smaller.



Have faith in a time when you won't trace

every airplane's path across the sky.

Have faith in history, like:

summer, we are halfway home on highway five,

looking at hay and hills in the distance and

the sun spots in the rear view mirror.

Have faith in things like helicopters and

horse races and horoscopes.

Touch your hand every place mine touched:

handles, doorknobs, the highest shelf.

Remember games of hide and seek

and hypnosis and whispering holy holy holy

in the dark, holding hands, and honestly--



you are still and quiet and home and

I am always moving, like the smallest humming bird