Down on the coast, the smell of the rain arrives before the rain does, its shadow moves under the water, it’s the dark with a fluorescent light inside it, an x-ray of the part of you that’s like the Milky Way.

Where were you when I was there? One day like another, drowsy, hot, the mind off somewhere with a sand bucket, unsupervised. Floating in the ocean stretches you out till you are bodiless. You forget it’s the same place you saw stingrays gliding up inside a tall wave before it broke.

I sat inside my life like it was mine. I was only waiting for your arrival until waiting became not knowing where you were. After that, waiting became knowing that your not coming meant you were staying away. Then there was all kinds of knowing things I didn’t want to know.

When we used to write letters, there was something of yourself you gathered up to send, it wasn’t even in the words sometimes, it was like opening up the thing that’s solitary about someone when they are thinking, you could enter in to it, you could fold it up and carry it around, open it up and marvel at the little creatures inside. That was what treasuring some absent someone felt like. That was what the past felt like till I knew better.

Driving into town, seeing somebody’s boat up in the front yard where the last hurricane left it, everything about the place askew. Thinking it could be that someone just finally gave up on it and left. Then thinking that even that wreckage could be a sanctuary for someone’s tenderness, someone could be in there asleep in someone’s arms, the smell of his skin like a balm.

I remember one day taking clothes down off the line before a storm and having to chase down a shirt of yours the wind got hold of–it made me laugh, all the world was alive. If someone had told me then that that would be my happiness in life, or that my happiness was already over but I didn’t know it yet, I wouldn’t have known what that meant, it still would have been just another day like all the days I loved you, that it might not be still wouldn’t cross my mind.