Outside the hotel room’s
sliding glass door
is a lemon tree, and each lemon
a milky yellow light
that has been lit for each milky
eyed day of depression
and each green leaf a different
self, a different kind
of process, of rehabilitation,
of brain, and brain-matter,
of the arrested heart, of vision—
I keep seeing the end of me
in the spaceship-blue
water of the swimming pool,
a deep-sea diver made out of smoke,
hovering in the shallow
end, being afraid like it always
is, the gear shaking, the face
not able to look at anyone
in the eye, in the two eyes,
my strange underwater self,
banging its head
against the drain, wanting
its mother, wanting its mother
to walk out of Cathedral City
in 1950, wearing penny-loafers
and high-water jeans,
I want to not have to think
about her all the time, have to
think about her like an alien
who has abducted me
and touched me
with the glowing end of a long
green finger, so now
I don’t know if I am the same
as I was, or forever changed
by the touch.
—Matthew Dickman, opening lines to ”Palm Springs” from The American Poetry Review (v.41 no.4, July/August 2012)
