We swept into the new year—danced the blitz— then staggered home to the hills of Los Altos, not as high as we’d like to have been, the lost days falling from our arms. Four of us crowded into the cabin, slept on floors, all black and white and gravelly gray. Remember the way you kissed me then, as if the world didn’t mean anything and yesterday was just a song on the hit parade? I bawled and bustled, wrote poems, heard the Grateful Dead singing a storm, watched someone stir pots of soup in the park. You sold the Saab, thyme spread like crazy in our garden, and all we talked about was getting back east. I saw December 31st riding on your shoulder. A ragged shadow did a flash-boom dance across the backyard. I couldn’t shake free, found myself sheathed in months and Mondays, sealed up in numbers. We dropped acid, counted out our food stamps for the next day’s meal, rode north to harvest redwood driftwood from the beach in hopes of selling it on city corners, the exhaustion of the day before like a tattered shirt on our backs, the smell of humanity rising, cars parked one behind the other, buildings black as melted tar, but the road a shining path. Those days all scattered now. A whirlwind of years plucked and thrown along the street. Eventually we made it back east, split, took up ordinary lives, turned pages, looked at books, lost years, papered in feathery days. Atlanta Review Fall/Winter 2018
Poems by Judy Kaber