A Different Angle

Jessica Lakritz

Take the ocean, take love—as if 
just like that, I’m watching it wash up
over sea glass and busted shells. Take 
intimacy, collecting 
tiny Redwood cones, a lunar eclipse we’d
accidentally seen, coincidence and once-in-a-
few-hundred-years events that enter and exit
in silence, leave us feeling enormous 
and insignificant. The plans, the placebos,
the excuses, minuscule or not, drift in and out
as if part of a dream, then land like earth-
quakes, spitting up dirt and asphalt and freeways into a haze. 
You know, it doesn’t always end this way. Breakers
hurtling into those great, weathered cliffs, foam 
left bubbling on the low rocks. Take the landscape
and its memories, coyotes yowling between 
orange rock. Another moon, or the same one but from
another time, a different angle. Which is it that we want, 
to remember, or to forget? Or is there a third option.
As if we can just come and go sleeping on beaches, light breaking through fog.
The constantly shifting sand erasing
any sign we had been there, just like that.