I’ve always hated August.
Hot insect noises and brittle light.
The sun sitting on your chest.
August is an ugly month and everything’s a rasp.
Headless flowers and choking weeds.
The trees sagging with the saddest color they will ever be.
Like your fifties, dulling green.
The shade of life that’s dying.
I’ve always hated August.
August is when I lose you.
Bookstores were always special to us
back when there used to be bookstores and
there used to be us
every Sunday the departments were compartments and
I went where the wild things were not to
cuddle you with pictures of
novels that had the prettiest green covers and
innocent journals I would have ruined a thousand times with half the words I typed to you and
ludicrous lewd passages from things I read before the things I stole from you became my diet
we loved bookstores because we loved our books whole but
books are real and take up space and as much as
we craved the feel we had crowded lives so
we made do with just the insides and expected that to work
that’s the reason there are no more bookstores and
there is no more us
I wrote you the sweetest bookstore fantasy years ago and
though I know you hold an advanced degree in applied deletion maybe you held that too
now I’m writing about a bookstore dream
imagined in a city full of imagined meetings but never like this
a real dream of a bookstore with stacks of floors and an open heart where our excited particles collide by chance
then divide by design because we conspired to hurt no one but ourselves
we practice ignoring from a distance then find our island at a table in the middle
it’s a display of new non-fiction and the same old story
a few moments side by side with our backs to our lives and
then apart again without a touch and without a goodbye
that’s the end and I hope allegories I make awake don’t slap as hard
the premises had promise but the premise was a clichéd ache
just a lazy copy-paste from your pick of over three thousand days
including this one if I’m being honest or at least more accurate because
the truth of it is that the links didn’t disappear when the big chains went bust
there are still bookstores
I had a dream about you last night.
It was a bad one, the kind that leaves me shaken when I wake up.
(If I’m being honest every dream of you is that kind of dream, even the best ones)
In the dream I was like a ghost.
Not that I was dead: I was just like Patrick fucking Swayze in the movie.
I could see what you were doing, but I couldn’t communicate, couldn’t interact.
(Not much different from the way things are right now)
In the dream you were getting ready to go offshore.
I didn’t know what that meant, whether you were leaving the country or moving to an island
(Sorry it hurt to write that let alone think it)
or what.
I just knew that when you went where you were going I couldn’t follow, even as Patrick fucking Swayze.
Dread. Panic. Despair.
I had a dream that you were going offshore, and I am lost at sea.
I wanted my place back.
I pulled bright spring weeds, cleared the choked downspout that made the most quiet rain a cataract, reached down in time to raise dead leaves that I may have watched falling as we talked about autumn loving and apple pie.
I dismantled my swing and its sun-shredded canopy: each and every piece, every screw and bolt and nut, more thoroughly than I needed to, more carefully. The junk man’s pickup truck would have happily swallowed it whole, but I salvage things more tender than scrap metal.
The swing was not a good one, just unsympathetic cushions on a rawboned frame. Laying across its two seats meant folding like an Incan mummy: face on elbow, neck bent against armrest, the phone and you tucked between my knees and my heart. But every stiff joint and numb limb was a bargain price for the bliss, for the peace, drowsing with you.
I could have replaced it with a better swing, a bigger one, but that’s not how I thought this magic worked. Of course I bought the same cheap swing again, and set it with precision where the old swing had traced its rusty ghost.
And then I sat there early on a soft May morning, on that same swing with the same plants in the same pots marking the same corners of consecrated concrete. The same me, more or less, waiting to accept that my place was not a place, not a where but a who.
I see the swing when I step outside to care for the plants (they’re owed their full season, after all), the canopy pregnant with rainwater and decorated in white and black and yellow-brown-green by the birds.
You remember the birds, don’t you? The ones that often sang behind my words and made you giggle? Those birds came back, but you never did.
Wandering the television one abandoned Sunday morning
I find a travel show about the coast and islands of western Ireland.
There’s a scene upon a cliff-top above the Atlantic,
and in the instant it takes to fill my heart and tear ducts
I am there with you, hands inside each other’s brand new Aran jumpers
and your eyes the only one of forty-one shades that matter.
I couldn’t be more lost if that sea were real and you shoved me into it.
Next, a typically quaint Kerry town, a typically lively pub.
We are there, too, sharing a table with strangers, still side by side
but uncoupled by the half-nine crowd and reeling trad.
You say the singer is cute and you tell the barmaid you adore her accent
and now it’s my stomach’s turn to feel: that ache, that churn, that theft
whenever you melt in the love of other poets.
I’ve never been to the coast of Ireland,
but that beguiling shore where you and I meet is familiar territory.
This is the guidebook.
Long In The Tooth 