ALBA
by Robert Hill Long
Begin with a woman in her doorway—
nightgown and loose robe, the spill
of light from her living room. It’s still less day
than night. Fog scrims the hills,
muffles the black surf below. She looks west.
Wherever she touches a hand
to her body—forehead, cheek, breast—
is a wing applied to a wound.
In the doorway’s dim parenthesis
she lets out ghosts, to burn off
like the fog. There’s no kiss
better than the sun’s; it will come soon enough.
And you, why are you watching her? The woman
facing you is a door. Wake up. Go in.
HANA COAST
In rain, the doves don’t call. Let
the Pacific resume its master narrative—
they blink away the details. Around each eye
a lapis ring chains sky
to sea. They utter a rivulet
of distances, yet live
at your feet. After the flood they flew
here because better than
any surviving thing they heard converging
waves of blue upon black upon blue,
moon upon sun upon moon.
They are the perfecting
of that echo. Their wings in the grass
that buoys your feet are rainclouds. Let them pass.
COMPLICITY
Trailing coastal rubbernecks, she descended
into a cave vibrant with the roar
of breakers and sea lions. Her eyes
stung with salt wrack, bodies black
as torpedoes made of fishmeal and bilge-water.
Once it was a sanctuary; marketing sleaze
made it a zoo. The adults avoided eye contact;
pups stared, refugees behind wire. She ended
her part by turning away. But she
had paid her fraction for the upkeep of this
franchise crowded as the bowels of a slave ship
turned amusement ride. She came up to the clean kiss
of sky, stepped into the road and was nearly hit
by a truck hauling the trunk of a redwood tree.
IMPLORE
Kill me in the water or kill me on the sand.
Kill me among the spruces on the cliff.
She was praying in a church without roof
or walls, crying hard. She could not stand.
In the zigzag of dead things at tideline
she sank. Kill me with sky black with rain
or cold blue going black and empty.
But she did not push her way into the sea.
Hard, hard to pierce the perpetual
noise at the edge of the world. The cold ache
in her knees was telling her to break,
break. No, she was not whole or well
but her fingers held one another, aware
that she was asking to live forever.
BIO
Robert Hill Long has published 6 books and won numerous awards, prizes and fellowships—including 2 from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Raised in North Carolina, he was founding director of the NC Writers Network, and afterward taught in Massachusetts, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.
He lives with his wife Linn Van Meter in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
