House
Laura Walter
We gutted you, boxed you,
threw out your insides. You,
with your mispainted walls,
your stretches of cobwebs for breath,
those twisting lines of gifts and photographs,
I found the locket, the drawings.
Picture after picture of me playing
in the waves, waving in play.
We found your evidence and piled it away.
We tore you apart. All of you:
The rooms we lived in, the roof I sat on.
The grass I died on one winter night
when your trees tried to catch me.
All of this. It pours out of you like seeds
and still it keeps coming.
We empty all of it, even
the nights I walked your path
in the cold, reciting
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O you-
to keep me warm. And it does,
even now, even though you are purged
of our things, of us, of our hold on you.
Borderline
Laura Walter
Talked to her on the phone today
about our traveling next summer
over red-rusted canyons,
the block-states, the West Coast.
I can picture us in the car,
feet to dashboard, breasts
locked under seat belts,
sun in our hair.
And I think I know what music
will drive us to where
we will try to go.
It will be something flirty,
something female—a tune
light enough to catch itself
in her flowing skirt
that opens to the breeze.
We must learn that
the borderlines call to us
because they are permanent,
and because we are young,
and moving, and heading somewhere fast.
To Beat the Waves
Laura Walter
He stripped to underwear,
dove into the ocean froth
and came up heavy-breathing
and wet, and it was so dark I
could only see the moon on his back;
I felt him move from somewhere inside.
(The silver ocean shooting itself
onto the shoreline, pausing, pulling back.)
The sand in my skin, the salt of his mouth,
and when we sat up we saw the horizon
was lightening into blue, and then
pairs of people appeared all over the beach:
Lines of lovers moving to the horizon, blue against black,
running into the ocean and dashing back to
beat the waves, to catch themselves dry
on the shoreline: tumbling into the sand
like salt foam rolling over itself,
wave after wave.