Suzanne

The plane is going to a different place
not where I was trying to get, but I’ve forgotten where that is
in the first place, the first place, I mean. Weight is stretching
on us, nameless arms descending through heavy breezes
long and rushing water remembering shape by edge and scale.
I stumble as we dive. I am not supposed to be here.
My arms have atrophied under this ocean. Last night
I was a cormorant chasing silver threads in the deep.
Tomorrow I will be some prairie dog or murder of birds,
restless creature chasing American men across badland sun,
a new world. There was a new world. I brought you with me,
tucked between my armpit and purse. The bluest earrings,
like the water. Salt. Gulls. The monument to the dead.
My father’s house, ripped open at the softest parts and
splayed for crows and us, in the quiet of the night. On the run
with only an ocean to talk to. Omaha is so far from the blues and
grays and things I heard with my elbows in the cold earth.
I will show you one day, standing in the living room, only once.
I will steal the future from the past. I will promise you poetry
and the smell of seawater, hidden in his closet, hidden between
my armpit and purse, through the first two husbands and
last two wars, the ice blinks luck, also called rivers
with a perfect memory. You and I, feeding the birds
on the dock while boats go by and by. I promise to take you out
one day. I draw your face with greens and one red hole, a mouth.
I will open doors and doors and doors to receive you from Death
at the last. I will forsake you. After the war, they will call
this new monument to the dead Omaha. The tired soil
will dry. You will not love him. Carried to the edge and away.
The bison are gone. You live nowhere, anywhere