Skaldetvind - Poetry

Nicholas Skaldetvind

A SOJURN IN SAYULITA    

I’m collecting things I can’t hold.

Embarrassing things — the bus depot goodbyes,

vomiting in public — everything to distract me

from the wrinkled lines above my eyes

like the minimalist tattoo girls get to denote the ocean,

or the creased hillside of brown palapas

next to the greener source they came from.

I am happy wearing the same outfit each day.

So much of me is unfinished.

This is how we get to be more ourselves,

walk out of each other’s lives like stray dogs

with colorful collared loneliness, become heartmoths

commanded by an unmoored flame.

So let me rest, withering like a single flower,

a character glimpsed from a slow-moving bus,

the one still spot spinning a knot in time.

I’ll be the small boy throwing stones in the ditch,

I’ll wear that toy hat over bleached hair until suddenly

my eyes fall toward the changing light of the setting sun muscling

the sky purple and my tongue dries without taste.

All the more eager.