golden
Driving home along the narrow green roads, past the white clapboard houses and the big red barns, past the tall slanted shed by the road with Blueberries For Sale and the old coffee tin filled with money, past the pond and the creek and the chickens in the road, driving home in my right now today this song comes up in the shuffle and in a rush I am lean and brown and young again, dizzy for a bad boy with good credentials who lived in a small cabin on a tall mountain in the back roads of Big Sur. And just like that I'm driving in the grey light of dawn and fog and ocean, my hair unwashed and knotted, putting my face up against my palms, pressing into the smell of his skin. And just like that I can remember everything: driving home in my little black Jetta, the sound of his mandolin, the intoxication of a terminal love affair, lying on our backs in the cold wet of March, the sting of whiskey, a million stars.
We grow so myopic so quickly so unsettlingly soon. Sometimes all it takes is the smell of pine trees or the light on the water and I am back again and suddenly someone long ago from today. Sometimes all it takes is the curve of the road, a few chords of guitar and I am 28 years old: ferociously in love with a blue eyed boy, starving to the bone, carrying enough love for both of us, going at it alone. Sometimes I wonder if everyone lives a little like this, looking backward from the freight train, scratching our heads, wondering how time goes for so long so quickly, or when we'll ever catch up.
looking glass
I stare into the mirror under the flood of hundred watts bulbs, inspecting my face, my skin, my wrinkles, my age. I can count the light brown spots now as if they were rings of bark, trace the thin skin around my eyes, the lines around my mouth, my testaments. I see myself in every elderly woman I pass, recognizing my legs or my hair or my shoulders, wondering how I, too, will age. Wondering how the insides of time work, how life ticks by, endless and instant and jumbled together.
