BOTTLE BLONDE
Mrs. Smith—the young one, at the other end
of an alley opening like a telescope
down the length of our block—would “rinse”
(another word I liked) her entire hair
then lay out on a beige chaise lounge
in shorts and a polka-dotted halter. Landlocked,
except on late afternoons when the roofers’ trucks
rumbled back to their dimly lit garages
and the neighborhood shook as if seen through water.
They carried in what they had carried out:
the Riedy brothers, tar paper rolls, a low crop
of shingles brushed with glitter. Enough
to tap out a little cover for Mrs. Smith,
who overhead wanted only summer.
WATER ORGAN
Who hasn’t thrilled, fellow citizens,
among towns that worship singing trees
or jellyfish wobbling like Victorian glass doorknobs?
Now a white jawbone of hotels gleams
where the bottle factory once rounded long hours.
Three men haul a little shark up the beach to their cooler.
He’s wall-eyed and struggling
(won’t someone pull ocean back over his head?)
but already sugared with sand.
A shopkeeper strings shells into earrings he’ll hang
so they can whisper into tourists’ ears.
There’s no such commerce among bottle dwellers:
we sleep in, though day brings a coin-sized porthole
and we dream dolphins lifting from waves
will make us into waves too.
Maybe our bottles will call to other bottles
and we’ll all break open with love for each other.
Simple ballast is what we pray for—
one opening blundering into another
until water and air tremble like curtains,
towns become fishnets of towns,
and the stones lining our pockets would really break
things up if we could only get ourselves together.
But there’s no furnace here, no television.
Soon we’ll come up for air,
shake into a sea of sails until,
like the caravels of Columbus or Pedro Cabral
in breezier years, we’ll go anywhere.
HURRICANE SHADE
Nothing holds in this wind
(says an hour to its lightest thought).
If the bottom drops out
(says the bottle) I’ll house your candle.
RIGHT WHALE PALINODE
They don't love us as we love them.
But tracked from beleaguered shorelines,
flashes of rolling flank and fin
conceive of the world continuing.
How we loved, when young and breeding
within quickening hills of pleasure,
to think the horizon so needed us
we could outride its salt will and measure.
YOUR MOTHER’S ASHES
for John Pearson
I.
The first was shaken from a plane over Michigan.
Two lie burrowed under her name.
The fourth box could be hiding a phone
or a watch—you hoist it glumly
then send it down the beach to low waves.
The wind drops. Lavabo.
Your mother doesn’t clutch at our eyes or hair.
Nor does a phone shrill with where she’s got to
or how long she’ll stay there, though the nothing we say
gluts sweetly, for a moment, as if with summer.
II.
Today’s beach is all ash.
We walk gingerly, not wanting to hurt further
a woman who hadn’t smoked in months.
Saved receipts are mixed up in this too,
and your size in wool sweaters.
Will we be allergic to more news? Go rabid?
We stop at mile marker six or seven.
Your mother, at least according to the gulls,
thinks it’s a scream that something not even
once your father keeps jumping her bones.