A story of echoes, 1982
once we galloped against the inexact in the backseat of your father’s car humidity a drape of kisses, falling stars unbuttoned against our throats shaggy hair caught between teeth, the back window stuffed available language tight bodies awoke beneath the tremor of an unbuckled hope so it seemed to me, long ago before satellites dimmed us into submission online in the night then restless teens learned about themselves greater than calculation dared those drive-by starts charting love’s mythology the rocket launches in the dark over the cape the scrip of trapezed fear as desire broke toward a police light and off you went remember mountain, macadam, deer leaping over a Pocono ditch syllables awkward as clumsy fingers, the honey of braided tongues where have you gone the decades and the uncertainty an echo skittering every lit window in the dampened dark imagined in the invention of breath
so it seemed then how many of us in the dark in a park in a town in a state scattered over the nation.
how many bodies caressed under the same delinquent moon, the moonshine desire cat-o-nine tails in the damp breeze, a goodyear of loss and laundry taken hung up on the land’s unlearning the bootlegger and the apple trees listening up the holler as the lights descend as the end of things in the night pulls yet another dark bend, over the earth grew each time from this wounding, owl feather and canine print paw in the mud, songs swelled in the back of a raven’s throat a black bird sat on Victoria’s outstretched arm, alabaster in the light, the heart shrivels in its cement casting.
La Mer…Confond ses blancs moutons1
but all that was long ago when childhood mattered, adulthood less the moon caught in the bicep of a tree arm a broken tooth hung blue in the breeze as some things then still remain true love comes undone at the feet of autumnal longing, childhood’s lines of forever-yours scribbled on blue-lined notebooks today, I name this ghosting birth you.
1Charles Trenet
