gummyrabbit

You came back in the fall and I told you you could go — already almost gone like the deer I came upon one day, slow breathing beside me before it leaped. You stayed and stayed and now the air is crisp with lack of you.

Clear days I can see Catalina first hill from my house. Once they played Rocket Man as I hit the top, specks of oilrigs in the ocean.

The factories have taken the sugar cane to themselves. In Hawaii, fields blow gold beneath spreading blue-black thundercloud. The grapefruit go away in cans.

We’ll work in Alaska this summer and in my mind we drive through cold wet wastelands in the night, playing Physical Graffiti. Some nights we stop at lost motels in Canada and when we get there, I’m wearing flannels and I’m tan. We wash dishes all day, we swim in the lake beneath cold mountains, the camping American families cook food from red coolers. Her silence never reaches me.

A woman told me once, On weekends I drive into LA, brave all the traffic, pay the fifteen dollar parking, sit in front of Rothko all afternoon.  After that I assume she drinks slow-brewed hazelnut lattes, listens to concertos in the Biltmore, skydives off the Bank Tower.   I tried to sit in front of it, tried to see it.  The first time I saw it, I was fifteen; I was with a brilliant woman who studied philosophy and killed herself at Princeton, and she said, Look, it bleeds. He meant it to express great joy. I could never see it after that. I tried driving into LA, tried paying the fifteen dollar parking, told myself, Look, here it is, you

I sat looking west in the Mojave and I thought of your burning, Los Angeles, your phosphorescent nighttimes, your heavy exhalation of industrial smoke. I thought of your burning, Los Angeles, and the edge of the west transfixed in your heavy exhalation of industrial smoke. The seeping toxins of Tijuana transfix the edge of the West in currents of chemical unlife. The seeping toxins of Tijuana are in our black breakers that role in the night. Currents of chemical unlife in the red drinking water of Vernon, in our black breakers that role in the night where America ends in the sea. In the red drinking water of Vernon we swallow factories fo

On Monday they must have burned your fur. Wolf dog, Sirius dog, your eyes shone motionless. It wasn’t death that hardened your muscles, froze your paws – it was something leaving. It grows in flowers, moves in leaves. It left the thick fur behind your ears last of all.

In the morning at my grandma’s, gilt teacups and silence, and the cats eating from bowls in sunlight. When I was twelve, running at midday, the women – “Where do you go to school?” “I don’t.” Mornings at the studio, with the closed blinds, the wet paint, the mineral spirits. Outside, they’re mowing lawns.

I am the daughter of white-oceaned tropics. As a child, the sun seared the waves around me and the strength of the currents was mine. When you came, I had already grown ancient as the sun, felt, in my power, the infinitude of the sea. You tore like driftwood, bled red into blue water. Your skin sweated salt in the sun. I am fair as the sky here, vast as the horizon. Somewhere, some woman wept salt tears for you and you fought the ocean seven years to find her.

    The leaves of the olive tree move soundless    behind glass.