Poem for Thursday and California Beach

Self-Portrait as Letter Addressed to Self
By J. Michael Martinez

X.X.,

Someday, across glacier, a green horse will ride toward you; despite steam rising from heavy breath, you'll touch its snout.

When you paired a person's gait to signature, what lilt signed your step? What tautology, what tense was this body's hypothesis?

Do you remember your mother's Strawberry Fruit-Salad Recipe? 2 round Angel Cakes (2 pounds or 4 halves), 16 oz of vanilla pudding, 4 bananas, 2 containers of 8 oz strawberries, 1 big container of whipped cream. Layer and eat.

Your hands shaking, you wrote, "Christ is sentiment."

A cup cracked through with sky. A saucer planed into the shapes of numbers. Every written thing stripped bare, the more supple formulation of given law.

I told you distance to a thing is the purchase of its reality. Why are people like that for us? The more we love the more physical space our love inhabits & the world's lightness' & darkness' assume the order of human tongue.

Last night we tore & tossed memories into ponds. Geese swam across, pecked the waters. I splashed at them &, after, my hands shook. You stood beside me in a red dress. I wanted to drown you this pretty.

xoxo,
X.X.

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It has been an exhausting day of chores, or maybe I was already exhausted so the chores seemed more onerous than usual. The laundry is not done, but at least everything but the camera cables are unpacked. Paul worked from home, so we could go to the library and food store and liquor store together. Because I have not had enough stress this week, another of my family members was having a medical procedure that ended up being more complicated than originally thought so I got to worry about that too.

We had a coupon for a free pizza from the new Blaze Pizza in the mall, so we tried that for the first time and it immediately became our new favorite local pizza place. Then we watched the Sleepy Hollow episode we missed, one of the show's best (Spider-Man jokes! Daniel Boone jokes! Halo jokes!) and tonight's Nashville before catching the end of the World Series. David and his kids were rooting for the Giants since Molly was from San Francisco and had the same initials as Madison Bumgarner, so I am happy for them.