FIRST LIFE
A jammed-up fourteen-lane highway
on the sonnet end of the city,
& I must get to the Pacific.
At the market I want to scream,
Put my ashes in the sea
with the armored silver fish,
the breaching great whites.
I haven't been back here in years
& the wash of nostalgia slicks
my rainboots: where we found
our first life together & left it again.
All the surrounding loss,
you'd think we were seabirds.
Remember the chowder shop
on the Central Coast? Gulls waiting
in line, big as baby sea lions.
The ocean air, the rickety
wooden pier, that blue sheet
loosed on the shoreline
like the plastic bag
in American Beauty, our dog running
at a flock of gulls, the burst
of white as they explode upward.
TYPO
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