Tillamook

Outside the morning is oddly quiet,
or inside, or both--out in the garden
yet behind and under this hand
which writes these lines across
and down the heart’s blue vellum.

The night humid and swoony and
lush and dark, cooled a tad from
the ironclad storms which trooped
over our town yesterday,
hurling bolts and rain from the
widened spigot of the rainy season.

The moon, just past full, pauses
at the top of the night with a
burning star nearby, some planet
whose house we’re entering now
the summer solstice passes.

This night is the start of astrological
winter, each next day slivering
off infinitesimals of light, headed
toward that longest night six
months down the calendar.

Tonight the waxing wave has
fully crashed up the shore, rich
and foamy and dazzling in moonlight,
unaware yet that it has begun
to ebb back over the lone bright
starfish up at the highest
incline of the beach.

Last night I dreamed I claimed
more of your stuff, filling your
black leather backpack til it
was heavy over my shoulder.
I was in a great barrow of a
department store, a mothership
whose rooms like wombs teemed
with so much lost life.

You a distant figure, some author
from the 1940’s who had died young,
your artifacts retro, all tinted with
a noir’s hue -- dark yet cyanotic --
stylishly suggesting a huge ocean
or the silver gleam of moonlight on it.

Among your newly discovered
belongings a pack of cads with an
old plane on them, flying in moonlight:
your Tarot, our ours, carrying on
their other side the secret news
of the fate of this labor I carry out for you.

You were an author in my dream,
my old guise of self, obsolete now
as the great shattered wings of
WWII fighter planes which I saw
laid out on tables in a room (a
birthing-room or morgue) I
wandered through trying to
find a checkout queue where
I could pay for this next
batch of your stuff.

Also in the pack -- now mine --
a book or journal you’d written with
my hand, published long ago
and fast forgot -- and some
photographs printed on plates of metal,
the way the oldest photos
in the world engraved themselves
into history.

The card I favored was a picture
of the sea at Tillamook
you’d taken on some
happy day of love, the beach
scene magisterially away
with ocean in the last of light
and you content with your life at
last, snapping the picture as a wave
receded back over a starfish on
the beach, its measured life
across the ocean now spent,

the dream ebbing as I watched
that that card in my hand fade
into my wife’s hip in the darkness of
our bedroom at 5 a.m., moonlight
in the western window a frozen
fire which knew this next poem
long before I did, long before
you breathed your last, my
shoulder still feeling the
weight of your pack,

my waking heart sad and
happy at once,
content.