West, by God, Toward Home by Fiona Tracey

When you broke my heart for the first time,

we fought over whose town it was, anyway;

got pissed when we passed each other on the street.

I loved how your name tasted as I swallowed it,

until I choked on the smell, the way you do

during spring planting, when you roll your windows down

too fast by the fields, breathe in chicken shit.

I didn’t want the Potomac, Shenandoah, Monongahela,

didn’t want water that knew me, had risen in rapids

to cool my body, had shrunk to dappled rills,

the calm of lovers’ arms, the pollution we were baptized by –

so, the old gang took me to that blue-water stranger.

On our way, we became, again, one, legs on the dash,

feet smudged with the kind of dirt that took all summer to get,

would take all autumn to lose, ate salt and vinegar chips till

our unburdened mouths bled at the corners, listened to Oh, Atlanta

till the disc was poison-ivy scratched, till we,

and the track, wore out, and we’d never been to Atlanta.

Our fiddle calluses gone, we brought the guitar

with the light gauge strings, built a fire in the sand,

and left it burning, swam out to someone’s floating dock,

and lay there naked, under the last moon of summer, all ours.

When the white moon’s path told us Go on home now,

I swam down to quietude and rose up in foam,

weightless, evanescing into the black water

the way I tried to disappear into you. And then West, by God,

at first light, the delivery men rolling fresh kegs

down your street, my street, our street,

the girl in the bakery window raising up the shades like unwilling eyelids –

and we are us and we are her and we are home.

Morning

again, morning

again.

__________

Fiona Tracey is a poet based in Cork. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Shepherd University and an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from UCC.