historic highway cargo ship paradise

Historical Nervous

hysterical, my mother in the backyard when she realized what i'd done
(what i'd done) dug up cat bones in soggy buried shoe boxes
penitence is what we try to say on Sunday mornings with tongues too thick
and not enough grape juice in that tiny clear cup to tell full the sky:

sometimes ocean side and sometimes barely out of reach
and when i stay long enough sometimes the sea buried bride
walks down in the dark off the cliff, coming slow
and without her shoes which were swept away in twenty six seconds when:

thirteen whirlpool children look up with dry eyes, bed rock side
and while she watched the water babies began to make soft slow bubbles
metallic and solid until they woke up on the surface and whispered, "we're cold"
they took her left shoe first and she gave them her right ankle and dreamed:

if she rubbed each one between her palms long enough
decayed corpses could come back to breathe and lay quiet at night
inside slower spinning molecules and southern city heat,
drowsy and fed by the heat from full stomachs and satisfied: