“New Tricks”
‘It’s cataracts’
she’s shaking her head along with the garden hose
above browned and paper thin gardenias in the dirt yard.
A sunburnt chain link fence stands between us.
‘Poor thing don’t even know’
regarding the dog asleep at the old oak stump.
‘Wake up ya old mutt!’
Laying there with dirt on his nose
curled around the splintered trunk with short sharp breathes
dreaming of shade asleep in the sun.
‘Deaf too.’ She tells me.
It would have been more poetic, he thought, if the hilltop gusts — who only chose to blow once the car was packed and eyes were set — actually blew in the direction they were about to set off.
At night came the demons. And in the day there was fear. Her same questions unanswered — the sun still passes overhead tracking East to West and East again, until so far away the night again comes all black and hollow, void-like and empty—
Sun rises and moon sets and moon rises and sunsets, and though time bleeds together like stuck ink in skin, not a moment passed free from awareness — of self, of place, of purpose, of past.
phone buzzes and it’s landlord Lou and it’s a text—
.
‘ps be careful going out surfing there’s a few narcs around and some locals can get weird.’
.
we find out later our neighbor turned us in.
dark out and I’m staring at the ceiling waiting for the alarm to sound and it does. rolling the car out in neutral and lights off riding the black highway. parking hidden. barefooted soft steps down the fern first trail to the sand to the great green empty groomed sea.
anyhow, here’s some dough.
the road peels away in the rear view and I think back on that misty morning mountain top — the whole world stretched out and infinite but blurred by steamed glass and your breath on my arm and the clouds roll lazylike across the roof of the bay
again in the grass or on the porch next to the hot metal table when neighbor number 7 walks by head all low and lazy sad stepping, like, too far away to hear the sighs but can see them especially when half looking over and up with head still down goes—
.
“lots of beautiful waves going to waste...” .
we don’t respond.
I would describe the flight patterns of bees as erratic at best and menacing on average, hovering a sting away as if to keep us on guard our wardens of the front yard prison
the needle burns like the sunburns burn like the growing desire for touch burns in time’s crazed malaise and ceaseless slow passing — the summertime hot mayonnaise brain a puddle of stale goop crust dulled down and dumbed up counting 1 tick 2 tick 3 tock — all soft-cocked and unused such as, is, and forever will be the atrophy of a soul in solitude.
they’re standing tall in shallow water and compressing into tidy cylinders and run, run, running along the stone reef like wild horses across an endless plain.
