In the House by the Sea
I admired the sea, most days,
but not the heirs or millionaires
sailing in stiff-capped winds,
buttoned for summer. After all,
we were the spectacle, two women
touching in all the wrong places,
furnishing rooms with no children
in the hull of a house gone still.
She had some guns, a half-missing
finger, an eye that pointed.
Sometimes you need to be shot, she’d say.
I hardly remember her name.
How the sky came in obliquely
through the window.
How the skiffs were a study in silence.
How I hid my body in a bathtub.
What she meant was sometimes you’re hard
to love. And that one night
I swore she was coming
for me, I just turned over and took it—
and beyond
the blindless room, a wildness
too foreign to name, tomatoes tied
and splitting in the heat, couples
sipping the wealth of bivalves, salt
of the Sound with open lips, the gnarl
of some animal, cocked and on the mark,
in the distance a lighthouse
haunting whatever darkness
was never ours to begin with.
