California

There were condos on top of condos out
there, white all the way to the white of the beach
and looking out into the sea. Sometimes,
beneath the blue sky, whales surfaced.
A little mist made it inland. I was walking 
through the open spaces, hard to describe
how innocuous the weather, air so 
pleasant it made me ache but with nothing
like desire, no anchor in the flesh. All
the guillotines of love were nowhere
to be found, Jacaranda trees, and black-crowned
night herons shitting on the paleness
of nothing, the fever-dreams of sidewalks
lining the pastel walls I passed, a sea-
breeze no one ever celebrated in con-
versation, only something I thought about
when I thought about the Midwest,
the sunken dream of it stalled, where
I might as well find a patch of hardwoods
and strip with her, no matter the mosquitoes,
lie down on a bed of trout lilies, 
with the dead curled points of maple leaves
scratching my shoulder blades, bits collecting
in her long hair. Always the dream
of the farm pond back there, or water on 
private land in a pseudo-suburb, with its 
one lone pike and a small clump of aspen
shimmering alive on the first clear evening
of the century, cold night full of stars
and bats and not humid. California was 
so clean you’d think mud was an invention
from the middle ages, the smell of pot
in the air, and I’d walk until you for-
got you were walking, but you’d never forget
because what’s home other than something
to walk toward or away from forever? 
The ocean should have been like a larder 
or a crystallization of every loved thing I’d 
ever spoken to or corralled into whatever
small space I might find and make my  
own. A little stairway hung in the air
beside a pink wall. It felt impermanent, 
like the seagulls that were always drifting
in and out of the marine layer. Little else
there but a lot of weightlessness 
and light blue. The red door was made of wood
shipped from some Greek Island
or something. This is how you wake up cradling
a pair of hips and no memory but
a feeling of clean light that evaporates. 
It says you can’t live out the rest 
of your life inside of which everything dwindles,
disappears under too-pale skies. I
remember diving into a pool at midnight
outside a hotel my girlfriend was paying  
for in Michigan, unable to see the water 
for the darkness of thunderheads and wondering
if there was any water in it. There was.
The next morning, I walked away through 
an acre of plowed-up pine trees 
and a few black flies drinking water out
of a cold puddle of rain along a private drive 
crunchy with imported seashells just 
outside of Petoskey. But I was a ghost already. 

ξ

David Dodd Lee is the author of nine full-length books of poems & a chapbook, including Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues Press, 1997), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Abrupt Rural (New Issues Press, 2004), The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books, 2010) Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), Animalities(Four Way Books, 2014), and two volumes of Ashbery erasure poems. He has published fiction in Willow Springs, New World Writing, Sou’wester, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. He is also a painter and a collage artist. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Permafrost, The Hunger, Pinball, & Twyckenham Notes. In 2016, he began making sculpture, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. Unlucky Animals, a book of collages, photographs, new original poems, erasures, and dictionary sonnets is forthcoming in early 2021.