We’re just getting out of the storm.

That’s what we’ll tell
the roaming wanderlust eyes
in the paintings above the antique bar.

We’ll tell them we survived the weather,
that was perfectly decent,
until we got to the one fruit stand in the city.

Why the hell do things always have to get so ugly
at that point? Explain the science of that phenomenon to me.

It’s likely we’re not smart enough to understand it,
but at least we learned just enough about things
to know that it’s time to hide our courage and arrogance.
When it starts raining bricks and talking frogs
back from Canada after a forty-year stint.

Someone said it’s a plague that came around
before either one of us were ever born.

Someone else said it was a lot better to fall in love
around here fifty years ago. It wasn’t that things were better,
she said, it’s just that it was pretty easy to walk past a newsstand.

I guess that makes sense. I guess we can either accept that,
or move to a city where all the buildings have rusted fire escapes.
Along the sides like a series of abandoned spider webs
designed for howling at the moon.

You tell me you don’t know what to make
of those faraway places. Neither do I.
You hear that some of them are amazing places to leave
your children for the authorities. Others are a little better.
They have opportunities for those willing to walk
for six days straight.

On the seventh day
you have to live wherever you almost die,
and love whoever’s arms you disintegrate into.

We’re lucky,
and that has nothing to do with still being pretty young.

The almost dying part?
We weren’t even awake when it came around.
The love part?
You haven’t thrown a turkey dinner at me yet.

Devotion is a good word for that,
and I also like the way I still trust you,
even when you take me by the hand
so abruptly that my spine snaps in two.

Not literally, of course,
but you get my drift.

07/14/2012

Posted on 07/15/2012
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