Sea Cove Road
It’s only a feeling.
Where are you going?
I thought
in a memory. And without knowing
how, I went through the door
of the poem. There, I was in it. I looked out the front door
of my old house at the yard, and down the street
to the other houses put there. They were carved out
of forests,
marshes, streams, and ponds, on quiet
roads, asphalt like a cloud
in a black hole. I had known
that corner so long, since I was small, and even smaller,
when I would have seen it as the light
that came through
my mother’s pupils, the image from each eye
lined up and made whole
in her mind; I saw
the way she imagined
my grandmother’s
life on the hill in Kharpert
above the Euphrates
and Adana
by the Mediterranean Sea
where my grandfather escaped
the massacre; there were the deserts
where their murdered families
lay in the sun. On this street,
eons hovered: trees that had disappeared
and the scent of bark in salt mist; the small beach
that had been the edge of a mountain range
a hundred and a thousand and a hundred million
years before I saw the white sky
before me. It was always
there, the dream of the air, all I had to do was ask. Once,
a man said this to me about sex
in the middle of work. I thought,
how stupid, this ordinary
hour now repugnant.
He was asking me
to read his mind
and smell him, acquire memories
with him
that would float through my life with me.
You should have seen how embarrassing it was!
For him! I laughed as I finished telling the story
to the squirrel who had broken into my apartment
after my grandmother’s funeral.
The squirrel laughed too, and then she went
back out the window screen
and I remembered that I was me
from two hundred years ago
and none of this had happened yet.
***
Author photograph courtesy of Arda Collins
