Driving home from the coast with sea spongesand sand in your hair, we don’t yet know how to die.

THE SKYLINE IS TWO GAZES LONG

Driving home from the coast with sea sponges

and sand in your hair, we don’t yet know how to die.

We don’t yet understand the languid metaphor

of a sunset, someone saying goodbye and really

when we cut these jeans short, parading

the impermanence of things, our hands

are just rivers. The Gulf is a better example

when our eyes fail at collecting all that darkblue

that calm collection. This old argument:

we exist before we have a purpose; just essence.

Driving home, I think of how the window

glass conduits our eyes and the southern sun

our ears and a song that doesn’t know it will

end. An old graveyard on the side of the road

decries the Gulf in all its green and gold water

without any merit to measure because it is.

Driving home, our hands, together, mimic salt

grass—and your eyes grin green, joyfully daring:

kill me when you are ready

just not yet

NEW TAMPA

Turkey vultures survey what’s left of this swamp, floating high
on oven air—looking. Looking for. Looking is all

they can do, so they wait. A jury of black birds lining the telephone poles,
the gas station next to the new car wash. They wait.

From above, they are both virus and blood—the promise to make
this all clean again. But how can they, even all of them

clean this death that does not die but only lives and grows
and eats; further it spreads, a civilized mouth

of concrete and color. The man who owns the new car wash cannot feel
his fingertips, anymore—they have turned gray, almost

blue. He wonders if the chemicals that try to kill him
could first clean him, his family, the menagerie of Wal-Mart

furniture he gathers around his family. He checks the pumps,
sprays weeds, and looks up

to the black birds circling already-oven air, incessant.
He wishes to fly like he does with the head of a fish.

When a man is your enemy, you take his hands, his head.
When the land is your enemy, go raze, drain, and pave

then add another strip mall, right there

Photo by thom masat on Unsplash