They walk to the ocean, talk about all the relationships
that have fallen apart around them.
So many women they know pursued love
and risked their chance for children.
The sound her hand makes against his sleeve
is the sound of palm trees.
They are confirmed by nature. They are confirmed
by a woman walking her dog
who registers their existence together.
He says he has been thinking
about what she said, that when he wants her
he seems to go somewhere
without her. This takes them to novels.
He tells her to write one.
“But I have a plotless mind,” she says.
He says, “Just choose a story
that occurs over a compressed time.”
Part of her knows he will withdraw again
once they get home. Part of her thinks
this is the new love she’s pined for.
They swing their real invisible children between them.
Loving best in reflections,
they make each child again together.
This could be our life, she thinks
as the horizon draws the sun down.
“We should walk to the ocean every day,”
she says. “It is so close,” he agrees.
What if this is not the end, she thinks,
but their pulpy-sweet middle? In a few hours
he will lie down with the lights on
and she will shake him hysterically
like he has left her. “What?” he’ll repeat
irritated, as she sobs. She will not say
“You’re gone. Why didn’t you touch me?”
because she would not be talking to him.
Under her breath she can use the third person.
For now, above the ocean, the sunset
is their tingling witness as they walk back
sniffing every plant they pass,
catching the scent of the sex they may have,
beginning now. She unlaces all certainty
of who she is without him. Tonight
she will dream that all her hair has fallen out overnight.
In the dream he promises
he will never desire another woman, and she wakes
into another woman’s life.
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever and Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
