Resolution

It’s too late in luck for drinking oil out from history’s lifted tit.
For lichenous days dissolving I cannot remember your soul.

I saw you bent on the ivory beach with head in your hands,
and the tide crawls up on us like unfolding desertion of sleep.
We ate piles of invisibility until our stomachs were like
two flat stones pressed together, sad and clattering.

Near endless red hills and the violent highway
or I bash your skull on the stones of six years deception:
how you will die as a bindle of flesh
so creased and pale, and wasted as California sunlight.

Tonight I want that train to Arizona.
That sleep in strangers’ ash like you when seventeen.
It is memory pressed on broken glass your disappearance.
I spent months around your ghost. Even looking in your eyes.
It was how death enters through the stomach.

I can’t trust the impression you left for me,
and your present self is a destroyed imagination.

You were very small at the time I admired you,
and from each glimpse across the water
you seem only to have shrank away.

I expected for a while you could dismember my realism.
I listen to your mother through the morning painted white.
She is looking over the fence to see her youngest daughter.

I too feel disappointed by your resolution,
only it is miles through to climb those hills
and rescue your relinquished soul.

I am more interested now in freeing myself
than to call back six years the footpath we split and say
let’s anyway rebuild our Peter Pan daydreams twentythree.