I’d been crawling up Portola for as long
as I could remember – heat-bleached median,
trash strewn in the fescue, smoke like kohl
on the sky’s hooded eyelids. Sometimes, the Pacific
visible, black rock extruding from the blue; always
the mountain, limned with eucalyptus, concealing
jagged chert, famished coyotes. Like an idiot,
I’d prayed for rain – for something to hush
the culverts, blonde and shrieking, or perhaps
a cool hand on my own burning forehead – but
I’d forgotten how water flows downhill, hauling
the whole world with it, or how my hands unlatch
from the boulder, its familiar ridges made sleek
by wish fulfillment. So I screwed my eyes shut
and kept pushing. I bit my tongue and tasted liver,
bile, the runny eggs I’d been eating at that diner
where Merope said she didn’t love me anymore.
In my mind’s theater, I saw an empty booth
submerged in turbid water, then her figure tall
on a stolen surfboard, paddling away, trailed
by someone with a smooth, woundless abdomen,
their laughter a shattered windshield, Perspex glinting
in the flood’s murk. In reality, I saw something else,
because the wind had blown my eyes open – a man
standing on the overpass, waving his arms, shouting
a name I had stopped using, in a voice like a birdcall
from my other life. On that old planet, we did not
have a word for gravity, and on this aging one,
I briefly forgot its meaning, pausing to stare
through a curtain of rain, at the pool of light seeping
from beneath it. I saw the boulder lurch backwards.
I wondered what would come from my mouth
if I let it crush me. If I’d say something beautiful.