How To Leave
by Melissa McKinstry
I don’t think anybody ever knows what another person means
when they speak . . . it’s just throwing yourself into the dark.
––Anne Carson
Start small. Whisper I mean it to the chimney
each night for a month. Crack the window higher
than the usual scratch on the jamb.
To know how it spreads, inhale the marine layer.
Instead of lowering your eyes, raise your chin.
Name some ways you know how to love:
sandwich sliced diagonally, needle set gently in the groove,
single orange dahlia glowing in a jam jar.
Remember how Ray Manzarek laid down
the bass line? On a Fender Rhodes with his left hand
while his right worked a Vox Continental, a spell to
Break on Through (to the Other Side).
Name what’s no longer here: the art, the effort,
eyes widening, desire,
feet vibrating a longing on the floorboards––
Let me get that for you, honey.
Be the smell of the chimney’s first smoke
in September, the stoking that made it.
Say you want to be missed.
Then board the Pacific Surfliner.
Let the engine teach you a thing or two about action,
the tracks about parallel structure.
If you ride a long way, you might feel
the evening of the neap tide in your chest.
Let the bare branches of coast live oaks reach
right through you. Hear the persistent click
of the wheels, their chanting:
cold resolve and woodsmoke, cold resolve and woodsmoke.
Out of its own shame, the night will come,
and the window will be a mirror.
While looking into your own eyes, say it.
Melissa McKinstry’s poetry appears in Beloit, Rattle, Best New Poets, Adroit, Tupelo Quarterly, The Maine Review, and other journals. She’s a Pacific University MFA alum, an Adroit Djanikian Scholar, and the inaugural writer-in-residence at the Millay House Rockland. You can visit her at MelissaMcKinstry.com.
Photo by Diversity Photos on Unsplash