Elysian Blues

After the gold rush there ain't no reason to stay. Should'a learned from the movies that good guys - don't run away.

It's not a strange place, this odd home where your face sits in my hand so full of distance, so full of its immediate fever. The summer has seized you, as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw lemons as large as your desk-side globe - that miniature map of the world - and I could mention, too, the market stalls of mushrooms and garlic buds all engorged. Or I think even of the orchard next door, where the berries are done and the apples are beginning to swell.

Oh, darling! Born in that sweet birthday suit and having owned it and known it for so long, now you must watch high noon enter - noon, that ghost hour. Oh, funny little girl – this one under a blueberry sky, this one! How can I say that I've known just what you know and just where you are?

I did not know the woman I would be nor that blood would bloom in me each month like an exotic flower, nor that children, two monuments, would break from between my legs two cramped girls breathing carelessly, each asleep in her tiny beauty. I did not know that my life, in the end, would run over my mother’s like a truck and all that would remain from the year I was six was a small hole in my heart, a deaf spot, so that I might hear the unsaid more clearly.

The flawed moon acts on the truth, and makes an autumn of tentative silences. You lived, but somewhere else, your presence touched others, ring upon ring, and changed. Did you think I would not change?