Stay

At five a.m. you finally tire of being in pain,
but there's no-one to tell that to, so
you sink back into it, or sleep,
planning to write something to someone
about it in the morning, which comes late.
It's one of those things you have to deal with,
in life, like the man you love moving a thousand
miles away, not seeing him anymore. It's sad,
but not sad enough. You end up having to go on
from there.

I have a snapshot from last summer, of the path
down to the beach. Scrub cedar and sharp grasses wrestling
their way out of the dunes, the same thicket described
by Thoreau, who said: 'you can stand on Cape Cod
and feel all America at your back.' Or something
like that. At the time I completely missed the significance
of where I was standing, overwhelmed instead
by the freckles scattered over someone's shoulders,
the sound of them driving away in my rented red convertible.

Still, love seems to have its own gravity, the simple
fact of being drawn to a particular person revealing
all sorts of truths and equations, given time and
a taste for that sort of thing, a mind which bends
in that direction. The problem is how to bottle it,
I mean, who needs another pathway through
the complexities of love ending, as they all do, at
the sea?

So you try to find some comfort in the order
of a day. The details of coffeemaking, the single
household task, washing the dishes, assigned to the
hours between twelve and one. Things that make
you "feel good" about the person you're supposed to be.
Peering through your own smudged windows at the warmth
and light inside thinking "look, he's making coffee, he's
washing the dishes, he's sitting down to work." Longing,
somehow, for your "real" life to look that way.

Which, of course, it does for a while. Everything prepared
for the moment when all the hoped-for guests
arrive to celebrate nothing that you've done, but what you
tried to do. I've wanted to explain this to you for quite
some time. The desire to inhabit the past as a way
of warding off the future, which is uncertain, though
possibly beautiful, just possibly as golden as remembered skin,
with the sand clinging to it.

Maybe it all adds up to pretending, the imagined hands
that draw you back from the edge of the cliff when
the wind rises unexpectedly, convincing you
you can rest on its warm breath, float softly, unharmed
to the fertile valley below. Or the picture someone
gave you when you parted, captioned "Stay."
As if that was what was necessary. And, ignoring the
obvious irony, believing that it was.