The wino took to a coma like I do when a faculty meeting begins.

The solution was therefore hydrochloric acid with a heavy chance of staining.

I daydreamed (when the fucking phones weren’t going off)

of the color gray walking the plank into a neon pink sea.

I heard a gunshot!

A blunderbuss took out the coaches table.

No intellectual loss for sure.

Now the football coach’s wife wouldn’t have

to slip off her top in my classroom

before the bell rang.

We get to go steady

and fuck before church.

Is this a nursing home?

If it is, then it’s child’s play.

I composed 17 synonyms for the word loathing

and wanted to roll myself like boulders of dice into the ocean.

It began one 80s summer,

when America still played tennis,

when Andre Agassi girls

from rainy places in Oregon

took cheap tennis lessons

coached by Bjorn Borg men.

These girls would walk, jog, bicycle

to public courts,

never a tennis center or country club,

never a ride from mom or dad,

wearing red nylon shorts,

white t-shirts with psychedelic logos,

not a frilly tennis dress in sight,

wielding castoff rackets,

made from ash and maple,

carrying thermoses of ice tea, lemonade, (maybe vodka),

pay 32 dollars for 28 lessons,

frame forehands,

butcher backhands,

miss volleys,

whiff overhead smashes,

run side to side,

across bumpy concrete courts,

(now all vanished)

learn that “let” was a noun,

announce “love” and “love-forty”

serve in the sunshine, serve here, there, usually everywhere,

earning strawberry noses and apricot midriffs,

dreaming to meet boys

who would watch them sweat

and smile when she ripped a winner past him.

The way you wore white,

the way it sheathed and wrinkled

your hips and torso.

White, still never the same.

Black Crowes blasted

while we soaked in the Jacuzzi

installed by a dairy farmer

with a broken body.

Candles flickering,

bubble bath bubbling.

I should have proposed,

hired a Black Crowes cover band to play at our wedding.

You clad (barely) in a purple top

on a hot summer’s evening

as we strolled the Oregon City promenade,

past the famous green Elevator.

The Willamette River ran slack and gray below

while Oregon’s last paper mill shot steam into a blue sky,

And the purple top again,

on Nestucca Spit,

when you flashed the pilot of the red biplane

spying on us splayed in the yellow spears of dune grass.

He gave you the thumbs up

and somehow managed to land.

Twenty-four vultures

shred a rotting harbor seal

a metaphor lurks

I sat on the lawn and looked up from a John Banville novel

to see a green hummingbird flit into the

hole in the house where the dryer discharged heat and lint.

The hummingbird emerged seconds later,

carrying lint in her mouth and then

drank from a dripping spigot,

sucked nectar from purple flowers of the rosemary bush,

executed all these disparate intricate maneuvers,

like the expert maneuvering the flitting tavern people make

when they smoke, bullshit, drink, eat Hot Mama sausages

and gamble at the same time.

She’s not here.

But she is.

Not long ago,

she walked,

not far from where I sit,

on the beach,

writing these words

while the old husky squints and sleeps.

Out to sea I see pelicans fly,

lope a better verb.

A Coast Guard helicopter hovers offshore.

Someone went missing,

most likely the woman with dementia who lived on a bluff above this beach,

whose tracks midnight tracks led to the ocean.

Her son was moving her to Idaho the next morning

after 62 years in her home.

I see clouds at the midline,

frayed at the edges.

I can’t name them

although I am reading a book on clouds.

Sometimes naming drains magic from the world.

The waves break green and white.

I want to dive in with her,

go under,

go deep,

jump up,

embrace,

kiss,

unnerve others with our mystery,

break into vacant vacation rentals,

drink all their booze,

admire the stock seascapes

and lacquered gulls,

laugh,

at those clothed city fools,

and plan our collaborative nameless work,

otherwise known as life.