I’m sixteen in the Bahamas. A drunk girl
on a balcony in a sundress
with a piña colada.
Burning, I’m about
to slip out of my own memory altogether––
still dancing, however, still
talking nonsense to a stranger in a salmon-
pink suit according to my friends.
Memory, like a shoebox full of ocean.
This life, like the forgotten plot of a novel:
Oh, the protagonist wakes up early. She grows older.
But through it all, this body also, full of thought and blood.
This body, a heavy bubble.
And under it a little net
my mother sewed for me
out of naïveté and luck.
He’s back. The death was faked. Yes,
he jumped from the plane, OK, but he had a parachute, and now
we’re drinking scotch in his motel room, and I’m afraid. It’s summer
and the sky is full of swaying lamps
and distant planets. I don’t want to be alone, but neither
do I wish to be a memory in a motel room in a dead man’s head.
I misplaced the invitation, and forgot to go, but that night
from my bed
I thought I heard the sound
of ice in glasses, dropped
by silver tongs. I looked outside. In the sky,
a few bears and vultures
had become constellations. A few
stories there, a few
more things in this life
I’d almost entirely forgotten. I woke again
heard my name
briefly on the lips of a hostess miles away, remembering
suddenly where I was, and where I wasn’t.
Later, the football coach’s son
will carry me to bed
and leave me there, untouched. I’ll wake up
with one arm flung into my suitcase, and the other
covering my head.
I had been wandering in a staticky meadow
for a long time, gathering
intangible flowers and humming
a single note, or so it seemed
until someone showed me a photo:
There I was, indisputably, in the corner, neither
myself nor anyone else, sixteen
in the Bahamas
sipping a piña colada, and tottering
at the edge of a balcony, while
below me that airy net
blew around in the breeze. I’d
never be able to remember a thing, but my
friends would swear I danced all night
with the same guy (pink
suit, my arms around his neck)
and that, after he left, I
lay laughing for a long time
on the damp lawn while
made of danger, made of weight,
spun on without me
and despite me
for someone else’s sake.