Letter Home

 (To Ian)

The night cuts through the park like a train
With a long haul of empty boxcars, going west.
I sit beneath the trellis where I once
Dragged the deep pool in the creek for my bones.
Now I turn to other things.
This summer I shall move to the beach
Because my heart grinds out sand and my veins
Return it with the sound of gulls. I shall travel
By bus to the indescribable color of the waves.
I shall rent a place as close to the beach
As the first bunches of grass and sit calmly on the porch
Drinking, as the sea runs itself out towards my house
Like a whale’s tongue. The wine will fill
My body and my organs will float inside me like
Fish. My backbone will wash up on a lost
Shore, each vertebrae another knot in the storyline.
A knot I tied when things went bad.
Come to see me at the beach, where the sea
Washes itself over and over again and turns
Up white. Come to sit with me and we shall
Talk about the uncertain color of the sea
In our eyes and of the grass ebbing slowly away
From the water. We shall talk till moonlight
And then we shall see the broad and slight
And moonlit backbones washed up by the tide.