'Flat Places' & 'Good Vibrations'

I'm finally--finally--in the Philippines Graphic. The day my dad died, I received the acceptance letter for two of my poems. One's inspired by Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese," which we briefly tackled during the IWP Workshop last April. The other's inspired by the movie "Love and Mercy," where Paul Dano does a mean Brian Wilson.

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Flat Places

Let your body fold into mine, soft

as the animal that fed on Mary Oliver's

despair and chased the wild geese

straight to an imagined moon.

It isn't real if the retina

can't remember it: A sea of lunar craters

dissolves in the chiaroscuro glow

of a dying afternoon.

You are still, and I am still

a mile and a decade away, still as a body

of water beneath the cyclone's

eye. Fly to me,

where the ocean is real,

and nothing eludes vision, for I know

how good you are. I know

what tragedy

looks like: the lambent gleam

of a nebula falling on an empty house,

watched over by a skein

fleeing the hurricane.

I know the thrill of running

away from home, thinking you will end

this running someday. But you

never will. Trust me, you

who weep over places

you believe you will never see: flat

places, torched places, torn

and toppled places,

not knowing the only places

that matter are the ones hidden

in the folds of your body.

Trust me, baby.

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Good Vibrations

--The Beach Boys, 1966.

The trick is in pretending she never really left.

After supper, two shots of gin, then a brandy

finish to start off the night. He plops himself

down on the couch, curled like a comma

a billion sizes too big. If you look

closely, you can see the hurt in him

throbbing like a thickened artery. Close my eyes,

she's somehow closer now, goes the phonograph

she bought from a yard sale next door. Cities

grow and fade, leaves turn a lush green

then the rich color of rust, but here he remains

in the crux of all this neighborly flux, gentle

as the last dream she had of him. It was Brian,

she said, on a moon-drenched beach, undulating

into the creased horizon. They looked

at each other, and that was the end,

and now her epitaph reads, When I look

in her eyes, she goes with me to a blossom world.

He likes it, he thinks, likes the way

it makes him think of orchids and poppies

nestled on the sand. Somewhere, a shot

is being taken: two people, the waves,

and the smooth bend of the edgeless blue.

Nobody smiles, eyes yielding blanks

stark as black pearls on the wrong ocean.

Nobody blinks, and nobody leaves.