Rain here

His hands are older than him, but these are the liquid light washes, down in the deep end days, just me thick around the boys who blow bubbles and the ones who hold their breath. Any hands will do. Quiet funeral of umbrellas, the wrong shoes in the right puddles, no edge to some pools. Best be under a better place when the rain comes in. Best be synchronized swimmers than out here in the bay without a routine or flowers for your hair. Knowing now that rain tastes different here, a little salty like it's never given up the sea, but the tide has shifted and the land pulls away, salt on your tongue, wet your forehead. Any hands will do.

December

These are the days and nights after the fire. Each one seems improbable. Though a little less than the last. In the old hotel down by the sea wall you grow sick while I open care packages. You are consumed.

Through the air shaft we can hear a woman singing. Soft, in a glass without ice cubes. There is snow falling outside. Now it's melting. Now it's falling again.

The first night we pushed the two beds together. Apart they were too small. Together they were the plains of Abraham, if his plains were large. We went out the next afternoon and came back to find the maids had made the beds as though they were one. They know about the fire. They'd build more walls for us if they could.

Outside the tide waits, can't remember if it was coming in or going out. Between the rocks, the crabs sit mute and scuttleless. Waiting.

Goodbyes

How everyone seems unlovable at first, until you have evidence. Under his rain coat he smells like lemons, hates the smell himself when he comes home at the end of the day. Lemons, like cheap cake, like solvent and window cleaner. His hands won’t come clean. Dreams of lemons, his fingers buried under pillows. He’s playing a character based on him when he was twenty one. He’s doing it poorly. Sometimes the steps come first, the emotion follows, gestures like cups.

We are in the audience again, watching the goodbyes. Someone points to the delusional bottle of sky. Can’t see my hand on your arm in the dark. Has anyone ever loved this spot? Or this? Not this one. Later, the perfect coat of attention and brush of breath. All these minor years and major hours, when fractions are your friend, no pencil to mark the lonely falling outside the window or what you will miss later in your quiet yearns and ponders, stories in the hallway waiting for you to remember so they can happen. How everyone seems lovable at first, until you have evidence.

weakened

He moves like water looking for the lowest point in the room. His weak smile before the coffee, the air thinner and damp. I am accumulating again. Outside the glass, trees falling to fire, slow blue static of rain. Someone left a pile of fruit beside the dumpster, punched and resigned. Please, now, bring me more small sounds. Turtle the covers and breathe your breath. This is the relief map of morning.

And then

Arouse the dust bunnies, rally the silverfish and frenzy the fruit flies; it's another epic day in the rainshadow with the last king of bathrobes and small loves.

Likely

How to not scratch the itches, but let the days pass. The trees, shyer now, are no help, letting the words puddle sodden and leafed through. What the body does when it thinks something does not belong.

palate

To develop the taste for quiet things. All these years with teeth in the tails of tornados, feet draging the ground, hands grabbing for air and then the cable, and then air. Velocity and gravity are friends but they take one another for granted.

In other words

This one's about desire (what's left of sunlight, just stains and spots), about the desire to leave.

There are things you forget, like how skin in winter can go raw when it's not been loved the right way (the tinking of the heat register, the scrape of ice skates on the flooded frozen tennis courts out back).

Things we only suspect (how leaves sometimes don't fall, just fall away).

All along the boardwalk, the washroom signs witty and indecipherable. All the way home, wondering about his hands.

Later tonight (the nights are winter now, thin and obvious), I will look up, the sky all orbits and trajectories, just spilled salt on a dark marble floor. How to say it.

It's all a cartoon love when you try and write it down. Nothing left to do but say it.