Summer is going quickly.  We are
			very busy. My brother and his family all
			died in a plane crash. Hope to see 
			you soon when we fly that way….

What we scrunch on a 3x5 
wants happiness as bland 
as the heat waving at us
from beneath its sunglasses and umbrella, 
simplicity so boring we relax in it,  
order another drink. 
 
But somewhere between 
the Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building,
between your miss you’s and wish you were here’s, 
fact slips in, inked lightning across skies
as bright as a Las Vegas smile.

In a postcard of Sunset Strip
amidst a list of Hollywood celebrities:
the plane was the same
as JFK, jr.’s. And on the backside 
of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier:
the memorial service was short.

All summer I listen
for clouds cracking open with you,
your brief alphabet of grief swooping in
from the skies with the late-morning mail.

There is room here to land
in the ordinary,
a clearing for what is missing.

I’m waiting to hear from Madrid,
from Tokyo and Madagascar,
where loss, I’ve read, flies fastest 
in the smallest of words.

She pauses from pulling weeds 
on the other side of our fence and hollers 
to her twelve-year-old as if shocked at indecency,
"Get some sun on your skin.  You look like a beached whale"—

as if her daughter could push arms through,
hook beams on like a bra or better
inhabit light like the warm stretch
of long underwear in the season this isn't.

Thin as the dandelion stalk 
discarded by her mother's hands,
the pre-teen is beached 
in puberty and has nothing
to do with whales, the fickleness of waves.

Still, I put her with me 
behind binoculars, sighting 
with the light-strained eyes of Magellan,
the water-stained eyes of Cousteau,
the moment before the whale and after:

curved miracle, eruption;
both, and us, and memory
tanning in the sun.