WALKING INTO WINTER TIDE*
Salt mist enters my nose from the waves’ crests
while Don croons over a dozen years of pulsing tides:
“Don’t look back. You can never look back.”
These tattered thoughts of little profit jeer at me
that I’m a boat beating on against the current and
glancing over my shoulder like Orpheus.
But I don’t see Euridice or Hades, just
you saying, “I want to kiss you.” Guilt
demanded my eyes go dead, before
your hollowed sockets pleaded with me.
This isn’t a letter to the past. It’s a notice:
when I exited the umber-stained door, the shadow
didn’t leave. It paced us when your bare feet
ran through the rain on cityscape concrete,
when I twirled you around with my arms’ carousel.
We drank the soft grapes of our lips.
Our fists gripped high-thread-count sheets
as you burst free in my mouth.
But truth is that I was a coward. Instead of
standing trial to your knowing eyes and gifting
heart—your organ of mercy—I pivoted on
that dry creaking floor, like the man in the black
coat and exited the umber-stained door.
And the shadow climbed into you and
hibernated in my chest’s pristine coma ward.
You never called me a coward. You cowered,
I imagine, on the floor fearing absence’s footfalls in
the empty hallways and the hardwood floor’s
cold grains. It’s okay. I called myself “you
fucking coward” in your voice. We were right.
My fingers touch the tender knotted muscle
between your ribs, your spine, and your shoulder
blade. Your back presses my knuckles to the mattress.
Your hair spills across the bed, crosshatched
by shadows cast from parking lot lights
through the drawn shades.
I swear I’m in the room but the tide keeps telling me
no. But that nightroom was a cenotaph
filled with our scent, urgent breaths, and promises.
The wind may not howl over the beach today,
but it will as it did before when it cried for the inevitable.
I couldn’t tell you to let love be lain down
like a dying child or if it could rise strong
again, or both. But as the winter tide touches
my feet, I wonder what it will wash away.
*This is my fourteenth poem of the day that I share on Facebook. The original poems I share here and on Facebook, including this poem’s two draft versions “Winter Tide” and “A Notice on the Beach,” “Forest World is Word,” “The Flood,” “Cinders in the Gloaming,” and “Proud Country of Angry Peasants.” The other poems I share are only on my FB page.
Peter Walks for Democracy 