18 TO 47: A SHOUT OUT FROM THE YOUNGER SELF

The last time you were in Big Sur, it was night.
You drove right past Lenny and me
lying in the prickly summer grass just beside Highway 1.
2004 for you, 1975 for me. Nixon gone for a year,
that TV war we grew up on scratched off the list,
and only four months since Brother Walter'd banished himself
by hurling his 20 year-old bones
off a ten-story building.
My period was five days late, so

while your taillights swooped in and out of the coastal curves
south of us, I listened to Lenny talk up a life for us in Prince Edward Island,
me and him and the kid unfurling burlap bags of potatoes
into huge bins and saving up enough to start a farm. I interrupted
to ask if those tiny lights gliding between stars
could be wanderers from another galaxy. Naw,
those are just satellites, baby. Then he lit a cigarette
and dozed off in his leaky down sleeping bag.

When I held my hitchhiking hands up
to trace the Big Dipper,
they looked too full of door handles and speed wind
to carry anybody that new
without letting them slip through. Maybe the world's
even stranger now than it was then,
but I thought of you anyway in the car, how maybe someday
you'd give me a ride out of there. I woke up at dawn,
cramping, bleeding, free again.

If I changed my mind I always figured it wouldn't be too hard
to find myself tripping over a blue tricycle,
the sweet smell of baby shit, my nipples
dripping with milk. Cereal bowls clinking while neighbors called out
and friends crowded onto the porch. Either that,
or I'd be dead by forty.

But neither one happened, and here we are,
stuck with an ache that's coming on late
long after Lenny and the other hitchhikers have gone home
to their sleeping children, just you in the car
and me in the grass
listening to the surf heave itself against the cliffs
and break up ten stories or more
below the unfaltering keen of your tires.

Katie Daley