Poem for C.

ALISON BRAID

I walk home behind a man who counts to five on his fingers, over and over again. In the park another man does pull-ups on the monkey bars and forgets, momentarily, about his son.

I do not look for you in the faces of these strangers.

I am back from Cuba with postcards of Che I won’t mail.

I would tell you, we rode horses. I tallied every sunset.

400 miles from here, you are charting new ways of being alone. I become accustomed to bad weather, am told I have childbearing hips.

On my writing desk I seed an avocado. Give the couch over to emptiness. I grow up again. K. and H. drive from Whitehorse to Anchorage for

Thai food

and I think, that is really living. I drink tangerine beer and let my hair

grow long.

Find my profile strange in the mirror. Sure I must be less than all my parts: organ, tissue, sinew, bone. I grow up again. Lay my limbs down and

learn distance

with one ear to the floor. I am still myself though I do not know it this way on the hardwood. I grow up again. When I think of you

not missing me, it is another kind of missing altogether. Practising my French, I confuse pleuvoir with pleurer. As it begins to rain, a boy bikes slowly by in red.

There was a beach somewhere, and whiskey. You asked how men asked to kiss me. We were talking of pine trees bending easy to water.