leaving long beach

leaving long beach

 

i am leaving today

my place is full of boxes

the mornings have come full circle

the dishes given away

i kept all the blue things

abstract paintings

poems

the beads and beautiful glasses

strange statues

i am leaving the futon here

like love

 

there is sunlight everywhere

the blinds are in disarray

here on the second floor

where i spent a year watching the city

breathe clouds against still nights

each evening in from the shore dreaming

among the tall buildings downtown

this is my final day among the people i have never met

a year on the faces of school children whose

youth is so beautiful and sad

and the men

who live in the alley shooting heroin

the students

in the infancy of their politics

praising fanon

 

amid the morning sounds

the yelping of blue dogs and the

clear hush of women falling back into sleep

a final honesty

on this earth after the early rush

this secret business of disappearing in increments

out to the truck

the lonely blue subtraction

and the earth one less heavy

very green and vacant

 

and i know this ritual of leaving

of counting down days

preparing one day to come again here

and not belong

i know the corners whose

inheritance and lottery i forfeit

beautiful sleep in the humming afternoons

narrow streets with names like stanley

and orizaba

blue dawns and blue alleys

roses pressing into chain link fences

longing to be noticed

even the ports in the 7 am fog

unhinging and echoing out to bay

clocks shadows

and the elongated dreaming body

before the wet busses begin their early changes

 

even the distilled conjecture of my neighbors

who never had a phone

who fought everyone

and cursed one another from the second floor railing

they will mourn my vacancy

for he will come

she will have latched the top lock

and turned up the TV to a blare

at the end he’ll think of me 

the placid place in the calamity

i am always the last kind face

and lean against my door

insistent as rent

 

i leave this key in this silence

the scheduled noises come

each day offering its small sorrows

synchronized sky and the 11 am etch of sun

the nothingness of clouds

in concaved noon through

the empty belly of sky

i was the early business of god

languishing in the quiet window of the catholic parrish

half turned away from me

to record the pulse and drone of the 405

to admire the faith and duty of tugboats

and to count the washes of city sparrows