In the House by the Sea

I admired the sea, most days,

but not the heirs or millionaires

sailing in stiff-capped winds,

buttoned for summer. After all,

we were the spectacle, two women

touching in all the wrong places,

furnishing rooms with no children

in the hull of a house gone still.

She had some guns, a half-missing

finger, an eye that pointed.

Sometimes you need to be shot, she’d say.

I hardly remember her name.

How the sky came in obliquely

through the window.

How the skiffs were a study in silence.

How I hid my body in a bathtub.

What she meant was sometimes you’re hard

to love. And that one night

I swore she was coming

for me, I just turned over and took it—

 and beyond

the blindless room, a wildness

too foreign to name, tomatoes tied

and splitting in the heat, couples

sipping the wealth of bivalves, salt

of the Sound with open lips, the gnarl

of some animal, cocked and on the mark,

in the distance a lighthouse

haunting whatever darkness

was never ours to begin with.