Remembering Five Years
The purple walls of a bedroom
shared in a California morning
we visited after college
trying to mend
the past, we were disappointed
with the ending.
You still go there and
hear the coyotes howling.
.
The broad dock water
clanking under a skinny deck
swaying and reaching toward the middle
a lagoon in New Jersey
where we spent summers together
when we were younger.
.
It still clanks,
beneath a broken belly
and the sounds of this water
still rock me, a plastic boat floating
determined in a drying river stream.
.
Five years wasn’t enough
but we had cut the flowers from the yard
anyway, they had begun to wilt, orange fading
the water becoming loose into the air
living somewhere else.
.
I never tire of imagining the past,
thinking it a bit less cracked and small
as it probably is.
.
You still call years later
I think of you when I visit the Atlantic
or the Pacific, and I imagine
the maids, tossing me soft rocks
as if it were you speaking,
finding me the ocean.
Passive Architect 