ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING
I remember a line from some classic
movie—that nature gives us loneliness
so we’ll find each other. Coming out
of bad love—a man with a bag of tricks
and evasions that he flaunted from the start
and couldn’t stop, even when he wanted to,
which I believe he genuinely did want
to do, though some emotional template
stopped him—I know there’s no more room in me
for that kind of hurt. The moral sense,
I told a friend after the relationship was over,
is like the back or the knee, a rough draft,
long way to go before it works as well
as the tongue, the cock, or the stomach.
My good friend listened, while we drove
the old La Honda Road, keying wildflowers
in his field guide, then stopping on the coast
to savor oysters at Duarte’s, then check out
tidepools, brack and lunge of wave slosh,
where a single anemone, like a feathery uterus,
waved its lacy gullet in the tidal breeze.
Only one, I thought, how strange, until
together we found the others, dozens
stranded above the tide, their bodies
closed like fists, camouflaged to match
the rocks on which they’d grown.