The Poetry Marathon

At 8:37am last Tuesday, I smelled
the end of summer. It promised
to leave with lightning this year,
promised more rain. I believe.
I haven’t met a season I didn’t love,
that didn’t fill my lungs and keep
my heart beating. Last year, fall
promised to stay longer, my dearest friend.
Winter, though abrupt and often abrasive,
has apologized to me countless times
with quietly grey skies. Spring
is my little sister, a hen under one arm
and a handful of azaleas, crown of wisteria.
But summer brings the rain,
brings the storms, brings thunder.
Summer stews hurricanes and simmers
my skin, covers me in English ivy
so thick I can’t breathe.

A lifetime of giving up hope
has a way of offering preparedness
for the acceptance of death,
training for a triathlon of loneliness
and trudging and no-help-when-you-need-it.
Sonoma could have swallowed me whole.
Boar tracks dried single file
arching toward redwood oblivion.
When there was but one set of footprints…
Maybe God is a boar, a pregnant sow
leaving those prints toward the
Best View, far more important
than the way out. Isolated stumps,
dots on a grid, planned. Intentional.
My scream echoed hundreds of feet
down that cliff, spread across the lake
just waking with spring, crawling and threading
toward the Greater. It left me
with a primal power amplified
by solitude, by loss, by resignation.
Fingers struck wide, arms pulled
high, feet flat with a boar print
in between. Nothing to do but keep moving.

The fluorescents buzz and hum,
an old golfer on the muted tv,
the only lights in this place.
1am Pacific time, and I’m lost.
“Try Hofsa’s Haus. Pink building.
Take a right at the next street, then a left.
The bathroom is right there.”
Pointing.
I don’t remember the bathroom,
only the relief, ready to try again.
Follow her directions to the pink
German motel. No one answers
the bell. No one answers the phone.
I have no where to go, to be.
I sit on the hood of the yellow Camaro
top down, palms flattened on warm steel.
I can smell salt and stone. The sky
matches my shirt; there is a noticeable absence
of bugs, of humidity. I lay back,
three feet of hair propped under my head.
I could sleep here. I could live here
in this one square mile town.

Our small house had never
been so clean as when you
came to stay. Espresso stained
bar table gleaming, on display,
a testament to your domestic talents.
Three friends collected like flowers
every evening, bundled
around that table for supper (your word).
Hardwood swept every night,
mimosas and bacon every Sunday,
weekly trips to the farmer’s market
in Marion Square, coffee and croissants from
Wild Flour as you went to work and we
went to class. Your Lightning Bug alarm
haunts me four years removed.
Jennifer across an ocean.
Jennifer reborn.

And what if I never see you again? What if
your hair and heart and humor are lost
forever, save files given away
and erased, a concrete cat with a guitar and a grin
forgotten and thrown away?
How to heal when so little remains:
the pie balancing surfboard sold,
the mail jail disappeared,
mostly empty mugs with tea bags scattered
then all cleaned up that final time.
Am I less without you?