Keep
Clear of Me; I Am Maneuvering with Difficulty
So I have to get drunk
over at Art’s
where the boys know
Barn
and leave me alone.
I know right away
it’ll get around
and someone will tell his mama,
but I stay committed
until I’m so gone I can laugh.
One of his poaching
buddies says,
Bead, I’ll take you home ,
but I say, No.
I say,
Don’t touch me anywhere.
He backs off, palms
up.
I toss back my Jack
remembering how to
keep distance
from men, friends, the past
that still lives.
Time I pay
my tab and go.
Just off shore, I
spot the mannequin
bobbing inside the green pool
poured down by the
coast guard beacon.
After pretending one way and another,
for an hour, I know
for sure.
It’s no fucking doll.
I'm too drunk to swim
out
and pull her in,
and too scared to
touch her,
let her touch me.
And that’s the
problem.
No way to get to her,
or get away, get past
the fact
of that blue-black death
staring me in the
face
like a dog trained to kill.
I finally know, I’m
not letting her go,
no matter how I’d like to.
I sober up quick,
stagger back to the bar, call 911.
Sirens and flashing
lights.
I lay in the sand, thinking hard
about the drift of
being drunk,
the way it pushes in and out
as though we are just
bodies
without anything to feel,
as though we are dead.
The ways she’s dead.
Someone, then no one.
If, if, if.
And part of me wants
to say—
what’s the dif?
And another part sees
her eyes,
watered down
to smithereens with
what she’s seen.
And it’s that look,
that finally gets
to me,
makes me remember how
we are stuck on this
stripe
of mud and unemployment
of the heart, always
mired
in each other and memory.
I walk all the way
home, tell Barn a lie
so I can crawl into this one night
before he knows what
I know:
How we run,
man do we run, straight
into the eyes of our secret dead.
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