[John Riley]

Brachiopods

You wore a blue summer dress because you said
I was a cliché perv who liked girls in summer dresses
but I can’t remember what I wore, jeans with a button-up shirt
perhaps, standing on the dune, the Atlantic
behind us, there on the beach we loved and lived
next to until l proved I was following the family footsteps
and drinking around the clock, but you still hung on like the last survivor
on the last deserted ship, thinking of the horses that were now out of reach
and the way the slow river bounded your childhood
as we said our vows and I read the silly passage
from Joyce as you looked at me, accepting my constant foolishness
as the woman, the temporary friend neither of us can name,
read the legal blah it took for the state to recognize
we were attached although we formed in the deep long before we were
where sea pigeons called desperately from behind,
perched on the weed-covered groins built to keep the sand
from being driven away by the sweep of the waves.