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The Meeting Place
The requisite tour done, their photos snapped,
congratulated on the honeymoon,
they left the pools of tourists on black rafts
and placid schools of giant parrotfish
to find the shadowy source, the starting place
where jungle banks reclaimed the civilized.
It wasn’t long before they found the path
to where the waters met, saline and fresh.
Someone had stretched a bridge across the bay.
No, not a bridge, but narrow planks to make
a floating pier. There were no rails, no ropes.
The water licked the edges, lunged across,
and they too rose and sank.
The strangeness was
the thing’s precision: one side held the river
and lazy river life. The other hemmed
the sea, where leaping, snapping ocean fish
surfaced and crashed against the rocking boards.
As if there were a net, the separate sides
kept neatly to themselves. There was no net,
only the floating bridge that marked the place.
It was a frightening thing to watch the sea
so full of life, the bodies pressed against
the boundary line. It seemed to speak to love,
the shifting line, the narrow swaying plank
which saves us from the dangers of the world,
and is a danger too. They stood in it,
rising and plunging, a long time in silence,
then, knowing the thing was theirs this moment only,
turned, a half day wiser, for the beach.
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SAMPLE POEMS:
Love Song
There’s poetry in this business of love,
in the slow dancing fall into bed,
when, after all our false attempts,
the earnest lines we’ve heard and said,
two clumsy, tumbling, unlike things
are finally and briefly one.
There’s no need then to say this is
the cause and worth of everything;
we can stop trying to get it right.
The room we’re in is all we know
and all we’ll ever need to know,
the finished verses, the kiss goodnight.
Fireworks
Although we watched, the city’s stock display
seemed still and tame, a galaxy away
from where we saw our sky explode with fire.
We’d always choose our smaller, private choir
of penny crackers, bombs bought for a quarter,
the rockets someone smuggled from the border
and lit out of the nosy neighbors’ view.
With every year, it was the same and new,
the rituals of barbecue and soda,
the fights to light the grand Chinese pagoda
or be the one to spark the biggest flame.
At seven, nine, thirteen, we couldn’t name
just what it was that gave them their dark powers,
that held us hot and swatting bugs for hours
while howling sparks and flying discs of light
shot past our dads and threatened to ignite
the trees. Whatever it was, we understood
that grown-ups felt it too: in Hollywood,
the artful angling of the camera’s eye
moved from a kiss up to a blazing sky
to show that love was powerful and grand
as all the Carolina contraband
that filled our yard.
Like love, it may have been
the tantalizing risk which drew us in,
our traded tales of eyes blown out by glass,
a severed hand found hidden in the grass,
two fingers lost to slowness at the fuse.
We told of what we couldn’t bear to lose
and knew that, as we swore the truth, we lied.
We were convinced beloved China Bride,
the Taj Mahal, the flickering Hummingbird
were innocent, no matter what we heard.
After the best explosions, no one spoke
but watched the avenue fill up with smoke.
Standing in awe along the ashy walk,
even the adults gave up their talk
of mortgages and paying for our college
and set aside the awful grown-up knowledge
that we’d learn soon enough. And though the spark
which screamed the loudest in the purple dark
shrank down to less than nothing, once complete,
a little pile of litter in the street,
each burning arc gave rise to new belief.
We loved the change in us, however brief.
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