Warp and Weft: The Architecture of Longing

 

Always thinking of the next move,

she never arrived, fully, in the

place she happened to be.

 

He had sunk them into the arid hack

of western suburb, stubborn footing,

opposing force to her wandering

 

eyes scouring interior landscapes

for signs of her own awakening,

directions home.

 

Paradise beckoned from the mythical

giant trees of the Olympic Peninsula,

which she had seen, once,

 

and from Maine’s calendar lighthouses,

the foam and gnash of Niagara Falls,

which she had not.

 

Mid-forties found her spreading

across the oceans, dreaming of

the Seine, of Venice, of Costa del Sol

 

until she very nearly drowned

one Sunday afternoon in the pages

of a Hemingway novel,

 

when a certain suspicion,

brewed in mother’s milk,

long-settled in low region sediments,

 

shook loose and wafted up into her throat,

burbling there for a moment

before gasping into the crackle of dry air

 

the thing she had always known:

loathing this desert

had been the bones of her.