Waves crackle after
a beach, twisting in mist
or shadow while harbor
lights, like the thin string of sulfur bulbs
holding up a motel,
where you sleep, fidget in
whorls of frost-dead air.

A wide moon holds forth
between bland pronouncements
on loneliness. How else
to read the corona of unbent
moonbeams smothering the night,
dulling breakers to
tissue, cellophane,

while from me, across
a highway, redwoods blend
and release green shifting
vapors that satellites stall out in?
Why trust my eyes? My body
betrays me daily
and resolutely

with age, even tides
limp inside, down seawalls
of driftwood and dark. What
keeps me out tonight and not over
your bed, battened in your sleep
solid, sealed with God?
I know I don’t want

to tell you I saw
my first love in a bar
beneath Portland. Thicker,
bleary, but she’s so intensely there
that when I later approached
and apprehended
a figure not her

entirely, I
floundered in Dream’s empty
hold: pulled close, she’s average,
pulled closer & she glows, she calls me
mother, sings the hard
aching lullaby –

swim to a moon out
between seas…If that moon
hurtles raw & alone,
mouths the red syllable of her name,
it does so under lightless
channel bells tolling
into exhaustion.

At a beach’s end,
away from town, behold:
the night-fire announcing
itself. I climb slim, agitated
paths toward it, and although
I’ll pass you by, sleep
in your ocean room,

wait for the husband
you deserve, rinsed in flame,
his heart cast to ringing
certainty, doubts carried off in smoke
spiraling toward the chartless
clutches of our mute,
ineffable stars.

James Young is brutal and private.


Published On: October 18, 2012
Permanent Location: http://www.forgetmagazine.com/121018c.htm