Having It All, and: The Outer Cape, and: Summer

Having It All

We bought the concept like a dress we’d never wear to anything; it simply looked too fabulous.

Now that the emperor’s shivering in his skin, our lives are half done, the family hungry and clamoring

for its share of what we promised to lavish, back when we were flush. Not that we don’t want to give it—

we can feel it in our breasts, the generosity we’ve become, but at times it is our very flesh

that resists when we offer it up. There won’t be anything left, it would say if it could, and what

will become of the little ones then? Once we were a bottomless well. Once we were mighty as men;

we talked and drank and loved as fiercely—oh, how they loved us back! Then one day love or whatever it was

ceased to be just for the fun of it. The event that completed us undid the cloth. And now we’ll have none of it.

The Outer Cape

Dozens of us hung on there, trying to love the moment, trying not to need belongings. Daily, the light poured in, requesting something,

and thinking we’d know better what to make without the confusion of money, we pledged not to need it, even as we hit the lower edge

of no longer being young. Renunciation began to look less voluntary; onerous questions cropped up in the gorgeous

middle of the dunes: What if this is the future? What if that crying seagull isn’t the ghost of anyone, but a bird, simply using its voice?

Through snowstorms and power failures we were bound to each other by collective emigration, until we began to get picked off,

one by one, by fame or love or the system, leaving the rest to wrestle with our senses of conviction. As the ice along Route 6

turned back to water, the hordes returned to take our lonesome beaches; we fumed as we made their coffee, as if they’d ruined

everything, stomped on our purpose, as if we’d hit the damaged area of a map we were trying, even as we traveled, to unfold.

Summer

Everyone knows about summer: it finally fails to deliver the goods. It singes your skin, rains on your reading list, insidiously lets you sleep in. It sneakily sends up blossoms so gorgeous and fleet-footed you hardly notice them going to seed. A beautiful woman or beautiful man, it tears off your clothing, leaves you forlorn. Since it’s all that December is not, it’s all you desire, all you regret having let back in. In September you cross your heart, murmur Neveragain. And each spring you forget how you wept, the wasted weeks and unreturned calls. Around slinks June, sweetly inquiring, What books have you written me? Where have you been? Please oh please come along . . . Your compass, memory, gut cry No, but you act like you’ve only been born. One bright look from the merciless hottest of seasons, and you go.