Why You Don’t Miss the Ocean
By Lindsay Wilson
In the Great Basin the night’s a punch line,
a joke to our daylight selves
who thought the day’s expanse
can be seen within us, but the night’s curtain
descends, and you find your feet on the edge
of your life’s small black box stage.
The community theater of our lives
where your friend in the booth of the all-night diner
talks through the casino’s chatter
of false hope. His wife suddenly gone
with the day’s maximum withdrawal.
In front of him the cheap steak and eggs
from an absurdist play no one finished.
The tourists behind him tell the waitress
about getting through all this middle
of nowhere desert to see the Pacific
at sunrise. Whole lotta empty to see here,
as if the night on the open road
looks fuller anywhere else. With the bill paid
you walk under the streetlights alone
into the desert’s dark fullness and quiver
there for a time before taking the long
back roads home with the windows down—
a little wind over skin. You have seen
an ocean rise from a hill
after a long drive, you smelled it
in fact, before you saw it, but tonight
it’s the desert after a thin rain,
petrichor and creosote, and after you crest
the hill’s crown, you see that wide sea
of man-made lights spread out
beneath you, this basin full to the city’s
limits. You think of your friend’s cool wife
who left without note or warning. Her face
now aglow in the palm reader’s neon
because she’s too poor to write the full story.
The beginning: pack a bag and leave,
but then what? So many dying from their poor
imaginations, action without vision.
So many writing a great first act, but how
many can find resolution? How to finish
a story with the antagonist written out?
The palm reader snubs out the burning
incense, the room thick with sandalwood,
It’s supposed to be hard, darling.
Her skin green beneath her brass rings.
You’re old enough to know
most holy women give dissatisfying answers,
but it’s a bad idea to argue with them.
At home you don’t slip into bed
to wake your wife. You brew strong coffee,
and as the day lifts its head from the hills,
you stare out into what sweep of desert
you can afford. The dark corners fill
with sunlight as you dust the blue
bottles your wife placed on the windowsill
to make looking out into this world
more beautiful than it is.
Photo courtesy of Lindsay Wilson.
Lindsay Wilson is an English professor at Truckee Meadows Community College where he edits the school’s literary journal, The Meadow. He has received a Silver Pen from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame as well as a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize XLII. His first collection of poetry was No Elegies, and his writing has appeared in The Missouri Review Online Poem of the Week, Verse Daily, Fourth Genre, among others. He is the former Poet Laureate of Reno, Nevada. His new chapbook, Because the Dirt Here is Poor, is available at here.
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