Legions those summers of your childhood,
windshields thick with silhouettes on road trips
past clay counties toward the English coast.
The new air is empty, and who knew
we’d miss even what afflicted us? We knew,
and paid the price for June’s green candles
in bites pulsing under ice cubes, gambled
flesh on the bridge towards pleasure.
How modest, after all, safety’s promises,
the ground beneath us not giving out,
not even that. Last night, a ship blinked
as it charged into the bridge, taillights eastbound
after graveyard shifts, tumbled moons
put out by the tide. Long ago, the British
failed to take the fort, and Francis Scott Key
wrote a poem. All that happens happens
something like this despite the lens pointed
at soil or heaven. We two were often
indulgent with our gifts: a chest made
of trimmings from the Hardy tree, tokens
from the Queen, a heyday for biographers.
When at last we sat by the bridge, we were silent,
your hands watchful pilgrims on my dress,
all thought blinked out where water lapped
the bay. How could we have lost what made
such sense of us? I still don’t know,
but understand this much: that rain disrupts
a surface that conceals and reflects
as divers search for bodies in the harbor,
the promise of closure fleeing what remains
of this extravagant, fatal, blinking life.