I lost my keys in the river and lost
the river too. This is the problem
I have with new cities: I know them less
than they want to be known, a geography of shadows
I still need Google Maps to translate. Truth is
I’ve been here before: another summer, another pair
of yellow-eyed boys who tucked secrets
in their pockets like lights they didn’t want
to hold you awake with. After diving in downtown fountains,
we wore our wet clothes for hours
like soaking in chlorine was what would finally
make us clean. Surely there were other visits, too, brief
and mis-lived, but there was something I meant to tell you
about the river: at night, watching its currents turn
like a tangle of snakes who can’t find a way
to let go of each other, you could sometimes see the mouth
of another galaxy opening and closing, there,
between the buoys, where everything is sacred
and nothing is lost. A local boy told me
there’s a name for the way people walk in this city
when they don’t belong here, or when
they’re learning to. Any given dislodged brick
could turn any given bridesmaid placeless, her body
a marionette suspended in time only
Charleston was her strings and the person pulling them,
the stage and the humidity she hung in. I thought of this
as I watched the river, its dark a tongue uncurling
from one of those gaping mouths, how easy it would have been
to step into it, to hang my weight delicate
above the wavering surface, and easier still
to misstep, to fall and to be lost to the tossing
of another city’s intestine, another galaxy’s abyss where
gravity weighs less on the drenched clothing of divers
and the boys don’t mind
how you fall.
