Warp and Weft: The Architecture of Longing

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.

 

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