my five year-old hands pink petals on papa's
big and brown as tobacco leaves,
I sat on his lap pretending to steer
the flatbed bumping
below us a pangean pavement crushed by the weight of the world
winding white
where it rained to the bottom of the sea.
we saw an armadillo and a possum and the possum made me think
of the dead baby turtle
it was buried in the sand where I dug for the damp
coral bits, soft pieces of glass, a net laced with beads
from Aunt Sara's hair, warm salt water in my tin
humpty dumpty bucket
(resurrection always a possibility)
but then the cat batting it across the dirt when I checked to see
I cried and papa said okay,
you come with me to the fields today.
I got to sit on Walter, high mule priest nodding,
tail battling bottle flies
the zen of be here now
perfected
by a swaybacked equine mutation,
the utility of hard labor weightless against my constant adoration:
he had blue blind eyes cool as italian marble, the smell of his neck
and when I closed my eyes places
I would never go
Papa in the pepper fields telling the coloreds how many to pick.
I haven't been anywhere I say when I'm asked
maybe the green lump rising and falling, the blue waves
and then the scab of land like a canyon
burrowing into the sand to become the sky
or someday a road and a white bone of beach
but after that, nowhere:
chasing the surf scoters to the point where it broke into the sea
sand hard to my feet like a path I would always know
the air a damp hand pressing my back,
at low tide hoisting the crab traps with papa
boots sucked by the mud and the atlantic glaze shuttering gray
the edge of water where it pushed into the sky
and everything I knew
ended.
on the one hand: gimbaled between where I came from
and what I wish I had not outgrown,
creamy tendrils of a white sand road
some of it washing away
I try to find my bearing
again, again
though never by returning home.
