is a passenger

no one can quite remember when they started leaving. it’s hard to talk about now. all those syllables we couldn’t hold onto.

the first glass of salt water goes down like december in california. head breaking above the glass chasm, twisted lines on the shore at 2 am. by the seventh it starts to feel maybe natural. surely we’d done something; penance comes only when you deserve it; they told us with hands on sunday morning.

it worked best if you took it straight from an estuary, even better at the equinox. after a liter we could take back whole sentences. in these latter years there are only a few words i bother to chase after.

a mason jar filled at alamere let’s me look you in the eye & whisper ‘lavender’ — early spring, the fractal beginnings between us repeating on interminably. ‘eliding’ in the deep blue of night, blending together in the years i knew you before we met. matching pitch with songbirds, cry ‘amber’ in the morning — hope you know i’ll always treasure these moments.

after so much silence, the sky broke & rain came again. you wandered out to the back porch, danced the stars down in the midst of it. & all at once —

julia had always known how to split the day down the center. live out both sides at once. blurring in the bedroom with the windows open, all the hot press fever we can’t get enough of. each time we close our eyes & leave bite marks they open on the other side.

we’re counting fallen leaves from sequoia’s off highway 1. parked amid the tall grass, a dash out into childhood’s abandon. she caught my breath when the asthma attacked, let me come up slow, until the morning split through the slatted blinds of our unlawfully occupied apartment window. she said we’ll only lose a little time in the gaps between sentences, moments of the deepest blue-black that promise “tomorrow, again” in the transition.

now the fever won’t leave. i keep swallowing winters trying to drive it out, but julia’s pulled on a blazer, locking the front gate, globes of all our ethers falling beneath the campanile.

the sun is so bright we can only see a few feet ahead. listen in on eucalyptus. hear children laughing as the pacific kisses their legs. we lay out on blankets carried down from the cliffs in backpacks. exchange non-fiction that goes unread, i retell the stories of discovering california. for the first time, always & every morning. julia rests her head against my thighs, lifts her hands in lunar arcs to block the daylight.

the district hadn’t burned yet, but high school boys had found the matches.

huddled in the back of class dividing shadows into uneven elements, we hadn’t even known

the doves could be killed in bethlehem. bison & sioux lain down both before & after the unholy wandering out west.

honeysuckle blighted in birmingham. letters from the jail recycled into newsprint, florida herself set fire to mims.

awake in separate bathtubs, i whisper prayer into tin can string memories; hope they’re untainted & you can still hear me.

as water comes down at the pacific gate thousands swimming toward the clock sure we could turn back

hours on the backyard myth we made as kids stained w/ wet grass & blooming july & loose t-shirts that just spell out ‘america.’

this is the latest generation of our drive to the sea. chasing lightning between pines, their glaring bodies realized & dissolved again amidst the humidity & heat.

i wander past the windshield into last year, that annular yearning for the innermost circle, standing among the jagged spires of every backyard & highway exit in the florida that raised us.

thunderheads say our true names from the cape syllables like secrets, calling out ‘bright water’ & ‘july’ as the windows vibrate, & for a moment i resonate with cicada songs in the impossible deepness of night,

echoes of sarah crying out in each illumination & tremor. we tried to make a run for it when blue fled the summer, two miles to elementary school parking lot, at full speed we might just make it before the rain finds us

with our mouths splayed open toward pillars of sun that cut through the heaven they sold us. all that holy coalescing above our heads, sunday’s dichromes splashing on the pavement.

they circled the subdivisions so they never have to look out at the southern gothic scrub brush on chainlink fences, open fields where grass & pines have yet to be human-formed & taught the english language. instead all glances round toward the drain, the empty parking lot, the PTA meeting

near The Willows & Woodbridge St. every defense erected against the people we're afraid we actually might be turning taps & checking the water for sediment hollering at the sky to control the weather

vestiges of last season’s harvest sit along the roadside the origin story & our first house, refinished but perfectly recognizable where sarah skinned her knees & training wheels gave out where i lost a fight with god with 2001 with isaac with asthma

poison ivy threatening to cut through the veil, from here to the sinski's before they lost the property to a synthetic debt obligation we simulated ant colonies on the garage computer, built from parts bikes sprawled atop the flesh ones, their stinger teeth in the front yard

& the afterimage of a Suburban inverting bottle open in the front seat, retention ditch filled with stepfather’s poor decisions dinah crying out from behind construction paper & crayola’s descriptions of the hurt you’re allowed to name, delineated into discrete elements

“i love you, but you can't stay” -- san francisco, ca

the first monsters i knew were all kind. they lived in the upper room, among carpet burns, manically repeating the language of early learners stop with a hard d, animal names referenced as the currency we used to purchase our bodies

sarah kicking out at the piano bench, hands too small to play the notes properly yet. just large enough to grab at your roots & not let go. your head miles above the earth, directing celestial objects in arcs about the room

rearranging tomorrow through sacred artifacts from the office. I B M, a three letter electric sonnet, & all the truth between snowstatic on the television. you led me to the black plastic altar & ran binary rites that taught me foreign capitals, the names of states, &

ancient history. your hand over mine, guiding it to the right location. was it even possible then, that you could have seen us at the diner? 2006. still sick in my alveoli, swimming amid ill fit clothing through the humid-heat night of our conversation.

long after you waded out from the world of poison ivy in white & bleach wash denim, the sky pulled down & spun around as new skin. weather held off until you came indoors, even florida waits for god & nothing has even been closer than your arms washing away chloroplasm in holy water

a voice coming in disconnected & ephemeral, long distance call from oregon. i read out scripture into the receiver, small words first, when max's single digits felt enlightened & prophetic. answering machine cleared before i got to the kitchen. does the holy ghost ever call

with neither of us there to answer? you between grocery store / office / & car dealership, pushing the blades through grass that stained my eyelids before the door & her threatened departure & sarah shouting hurt as the dandelions died, seeds unspread.

we made some gentle memories

alamere falls, ca june 2017

in every version of the story you’re in the back of my car matching pitch with preternatural beings, horn calls come to signal that everything we knew will now be different. on an elevated plane above the sprawl,

taking communion with rain drops in the desert, at the center of puget sound on the upper deck, no words between us but i hope you understand you have always been the flashlight between pines in the meadow. you tended the sagebrush roots