Member-only story
Shoreline
a poem
I envy you your easy capacity for forgetting, your memory
so pliable it reshapes the past into any shape you choose,
While I am left here in this place you’ve abandoned me to,
this emptiness at my shoulder like some creature
too monstrous to face.
There is nothing to say to it anyway. If I faced it now
we would only gibber at one another. It follows me
like an idiot child, its hands full of hope.
You’ve never closed a door behind you in your life.
I’ve never known what it is to leave one open.
The locks on the river hold back nothing, only let
the swelling water spill in long cascades. I’ve stood
on the sand watching the slap slap of water against
iron, like a code promising happiness if only
I could decipher it.
How commonplace your elaborate escapes, while I sit
in this room of mirrors, the memory wheel turning and turning
like a broken cylinder in a lock that never catches, won’t hold
a key, won’t fasten on any teeth, just spins and spins.
I would hate you if I could, if there weren’t so much love
in the way, like some river I keep struggling in, the shore
always an unreachable distance away.
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Copyright 2009 Marguerite Floyd all rights reserved
