J P Dancing Bear

“Meanwhile, where is the sea? The city?”

                                    —Jesse Lee Kercheval

Where are all the squirrels manifesting
the seasonal businesses? My love, I've stood
on a rooftop for hours, squinting into what
I think is fog, but where is the dampness?
Rumors in this building say you are swept out
to sea—or carried away by gulls. Where
are the flags that once regaled this city?

Where is the lighthouse?—a thousand sailors
are nearly crashing into death. And here am I,
a loose shirt on a still day. Why the roof
and not the ghost roads below? I came
all this way to find you—I will not stay
another hour, slumped outside your locked
apartment, listening to all this quiet, watching
shadows and light shifting from under your door.

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J P Dancing Bear is editor of Verse Daily. He is the author of sixteen collections of poetry, most recently, Of Oracles and Monsters (Glass Lyre Press, 2020), and Fish Singing Foxes (Salmon Poetry, 2019). His work has appeared in hundreds of magazines and elsewhere.