1.

I can’t say for certain what fortune I might have walked away from when instead of home I came back for the smooth immutable edge of glassy water, its crystal spilling over the shore’s daybreak- honeyed lip where the very peak of the sand, too, was glistening, where the water’s body soaked through every blonde grain itself, each glossed remnant, each sun-bleached arm of driftwood, each pocket shovel discarded by the children playing near the very edge of its percussive waves that spread their palms across the waist of the beach, scaling fingers along the shoreline’s backbone, utterly devouring it, and the water was like the sky itself, alight and silvery, its skin too just beginning to warm to the suggestive touch of the sun– which was still emerging from behind the peak of the dunes’ silky bluff– upon its delicate shoulder. What could I have imagined that I hadn’t already buried myself beneath? The truth is I’ve grown Bred of living with just the bite of cold sand between my palms, its mucky grains rough on my tongue, grit raw in my teeth. Tired of the view from my underworld which is nothing more than nightfall, more wet and musk in my nose, here in the beach under the squeaky sand with all the bones of birds and fish that washed up last year, the same falling asleep to eager plovers running up and down opposite the waves above. So when the shivering wind came down hard to the south, it seemed like as good a time as any to tack just as hard, its fingers purling up the roots of my hair and sparking their flint on the back of my neck with cold splendor, waking me anew, my feet replied by coming up too close, hasty even, to the water, aching for more tender gestures, for my legs to be swarmed by its breakers where the curling shock bit into the very Bps of my hip bones and filled the arches in my sneakers that were already long caught in the sand–I decided for once I wouldn’t turn away from my own wants no matter how cold it might make me, even if it meant letting the messy swash rush up and over, knock me back into the ground. No doubt I’m still shivering, no doubt my time here is borrowed like so much else, and no doubt home is trying to cut a signal, but before I go disappearing back into the earth, dissolving into a gathering of pin holes bubbling at the hard shore’s surface, I want for once to join in the chorus of the greedy who care only for more, never Bring of the more, never an if about more (they say fuck no to asking). I want to be the endlessness of the possibility of water quaking against the unrepenting coast which is also how fate found…

2.

me on my knees in the garden delicately drawing out the dead blades and last year’s decimated stems from the shimmering crown of a single, sudden peony. I was good, resisted every temptation to move too fast, to risk interrupting how the renewal buds were feeding upon its bashfully petrified legs all winter. And wasn’t I lucky, as you once said, because a peony might only bloom every other year, and here the richest blossom was ripening on the end of its stem over which my stunned jaw was stuck agape at the pink bulb upon a stalk already as high as my hips. I took everything that had done its best to flourish the year before, that had spent a season beneath the snow, turning rough, turning liquid, turning like a wave into itself and melting back into the earth, all to feed this bright new pomp, its lip leaves glossed with a sugary sweet sap that could draw every ant for miles to lap up whatever they could while the flower awash unveils itself so achingly slow. We’re happy considering the ant’s delight until the peony becomes laden by its bloom and the visitors upon it, fainting from its own weight, from the sustained effort it takes to be so desired, face falling in the dirt, the very reason I sneak behind the weeping cherry tree to lift its little altar, its fragrance refusing to stay where it falls on the tongue when I press the lusty velvet petals against my cheeks, knowing if I peeled back every feather from the bloom, plucked them each away deliberately to try to find you beneath one, even if the bomb were thousands of petals, I’d still come up in want. Fingers sticky with sap, palms covered in a swarm of ants horrified by what I’ve done. But this isn’t about saying I’m sorry. This isn’t where I say I’m sorry. I know…

3.

I’ve tried sitting perfectly still, which is harder than it looks, maybe you saw me? As in you can see but you can’t have, and everyone has to learn how to be fine with that, fine with holding your hands in your lap, fine with the peony’s spice and citrus on your breath but not in your belly, fine with dirt under your fingernails and in the lines of your palms your childhood friend once tried to read while holding an apple and a palm-reading book, one in each hand, she said your lifeline was forked and windswept, she said your love line was faint, a loose yarn of wildflowers, what the distracted children lazily strung together, the unfinished ends of all the stems branching off and messy, not to be stretched lest they unravel, sticky with the sap of flower sticks snarled, and maybe you’d never know how to love at all, and that the lines of money, sun, and head were all crossing over one another impossible to parse without wrecking the skin, like the way the waves smack the beach and smother each other when the tide changes direction and the undertow is stronger than you at first grasped, sucking heavy at your ankles, ripping back the layers of reticent sand and churning it, changing all the rocks into stones, changing all the stones into what you might later skip over flat water when it returns, counting aloud as the surfaces slap like palms against its glimmering skin, dipping but never breaking, water much tougher than you thought, the concentric circles rippling away into the nothing they were before you got there, the stones treading out into the horizon, further than you can see afield before finally being pulled under, did you imagine it? Was this in that fortune she gave you? Try to think. What did she read to you while she devoured that pink-fleshed apple? Its juice glazing the back of her hand, running down to her elbow? The words at the end of her mouth. What were they? You should have listened. Should you have? Listened when she said you should just dismiss the idea of loving, run on home, be more the way the peony unfurls, its perfect, tantalizing pink–temporal. maybe it could be, maybe it is more than enough for you, and you just want to know what exactly is enough for you…

4.

How can we even take our eyes off them? How can we refuse getting into the garden with anything we know for certain wants us there too, slinking as close as we possibly can, heads low to the ground, to whatever desires our tending to it, tending to its tenderness, tending to the tenderness we find within ourselves when we’re all palms in the musky dirt? We are more tender there, aren’t we? Vulnerable as we are to our own physicality – like the peonies and their own weak necks, their own way of arriving, every year the possibility of more blossoms on the same frail stem if you let them feed on themselves, if you give them so very little – how can we not love them for that, the way we love the lustrous glass of the lake’s endless shoreline, running north until where we can’t ever see the end of it, spilling all its contents at once from its brimming mouth, offering it all to us, we who have no way at all with words, are well unearthed and awash, the water so unable to help itself against the force of legs, the hem of a skirt as it is? How can we not want to watch every particle of water disappear back into the earth or cup them in our hands and ask them to forgive us for not loving them better, if that’s what they wanted, or maybe for loving them better than anything else in this world when maybe they hated us for that, or the way we might love a peony, the way the peony would never love us and that’s what’s most needed here, something more like desire not destiny, a thing we can offer our whole bright selves to, selves without fortune whose mouths feast on the dead to be ripe with the living, mouths at the edge of the water somehow withering, somehow, still, there’s thirst, an indelicate chorus at the edge of them smacking the sugary gore of apples from every grubby contour of every open palm?