This one is called "Explaining Sadness."
For my birthday, Scott brought me
a boomerang. He found it in an alley,
and I tucked it into my belt, strutted around the bar
until they kicked me out for having a weapon in my pants.
At home, I hung it on the wall, thought of the little girl who
might have thrown it, sitting at the window every night,
waiting for it to return like her father,
who told her before leaving that accidents only happened
to the careless and ignorant.
I once slammed my sister's finger in the car door.
Maybe I meant to.
During last month's storm, an oak
fell into our high school English teacher's living room.
No one pointed a finger at the tree.
A neighbor told his daughter the tree got tired
and needed to lie down.
That night, she dreamed of being knocked over
and not getting back up, but being swallowed into the Earth.
I miss the hills of the graveyard, swollen
with gravestones that were never made
because the families of the dead couldn't afford them.
I say this to my mother, and I know
there's nothing to do but pace the room until I have caught up
with my shadow.
And the feedback on the phone is the sound
of my first girlfriend singing in the shower.
Tonight I'll take any distraction.
I'll listen for any creature that
cries because of the sunset, to any drop of water that
thinks it's independent enough to leave its mother in search
of the river.
We make our own canyons if we drag our feet long enough.
And if we refuse to move and are impaired by depression,
death sneaks up on its four spindly legs
and rips us from our body like a sheet of notebook paper.
Little girl, we know each other only by this chunk of wood,
but I still imagine you waking, your hair folded
over your shoulders like the wings of bats,
crying because you are afraid of the future, its toenails
growing beneath your bed.
If we ever meet, I'll confess that I've
been having the same dream for the last 10 years.
A friend falls asleep and has a seizure, chokes on his vomit.
His mother holds my hand.
That drop of water makes its way to the ocean,
leaves its trail on the beaches of Sierra Leone and Koidu,
where the rain is good luck, and the amputees
walk with their heads down to find the diamonds in the mud.