And last month’s bluebonnet slanting over the meadowgrass path no one knows who cut. You could run down the hill fast, almost stumbling, Braes Bayou running sunward, out of sight, and toward the bend that drops into Buffalo Bayou, miles from Galveston Bay, miles from where the gulls, you think, day-trip in autumn: past the gray-wrought long breakers at San Louis Pass and Matagorda, past the first light warning from the lighthouse at Griffin’s Point, past Rio Hondo, past Boca Chica, where they turn above the telephone polls and span their wings and aim their white landing for the dumpsters, almost empty but caked with lice, you figure, and a pom-pom stolen from Friday’s McAllen-Edinburg game–that after one father swings a blade at another that hardly shines under the halogen lamplight refracting across the dumptruck gravel parking lot, and no one thinks anything of it, as no one thinks anything of the pom-pom stolen from a pickup someone named Lloyd drove someone named Carolyn in and parked at the Stop N Go and went in to buy six-pack cans of Lone Star. But to leap the matter of the bayou, six-feet, you had to climb up again, look over the highway traffic, then run down, take the last footstep half over the water’s edge. If someone were watching, you had to learn, right then, to fly. Mind the gull’s black-masked flight, and you find yourself on a wire, head to the left, to the right, monocular, cloud cover. As in you mind a girl’s hand in yours after she’s watched you leap. That’s why you begin to sing what you heard on the radio, driving to Galveston Island, I-45, hot and long, and a flat haze landing in the afternoon dusk, landing right inside you as a twin-jet touches down alongside at Hobby. You’re singing above the reverb: “If Drinking Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will).” It’s not memory now, but the break and break again of a wave you can’t interpret, can’t get inside, or love, or take with you when you’re gone.
A poem by David Biespiel, who has a new essay today on, among other things, how to think about sitting down to write. Obsession! Weakness! Diving! Cowboys! All there in this week’s Poetry Wire: Follow Your Strengths, Manage Your Weaknesses, and Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.