Road Trip to See My Ex in Palm Springs
| Somewhere in the weary expanse of sky still wearing last night’s prom dress, a cloud corsages across the sun. Soon the blue grays like we all do, one strand at a time, then in swaths. One day the gray crowds our reflection. In this made-up place of throwbacks and thongs, amid the turquoise and rabbit brown landscape, even expected weather arrives like a surprise guest. My last marriage was like this: barren desert beneath the glitz of palms and glistening with the false promise of an infinity pool. So, when I show up unexpectedly at my ex-husband’s home in Palm Springs, bringing words and little else, the door swings wide. When did we get so old? The golf course courses green as we watch a man raise his club, chop the still air into salad. My ex says take the lemons, the grapefruit, the trees heaving what will soon rot. What else is there to do but scavenge whatever remains? Another day, I will gaze at Helen Frankenthaler’s Cloud Burst on the wall of the Palm Springs Art Museum and remember flying over LA with this former husband as it burned in protest, smoke circling our flight to the desert. Then a fight, citrus hurled as I curled away. Cruel. Cool Palm Springs. Time capsuling a past I once and never knew. Maybe I’ve come to rewrite this place. Erase is too strong a verb. I could renovate my memory like the mid-century moderns slouched on the low hills. New Sub-Zero fridge, retile the pool. Maybe I’ll stay. Maybe I’ll flip it, double my money, and move on. Or satchel memory, throw it into the back seat of my old convertible, drive over the 67 toward the Pacific and Mexico. Maybe there is no real escape, just the movement of the sun. On the day that Joan Didion dies, I see the tarnished gilt of California as she wrote it: haunted by the Santa Ana winds, snakes, and fires but jasmine-cloaked and sapphired blue. Last night, I peered over a gate to see men swimming naked, a movie playing on the wall, dance music in the citrus air. This morning, they breakfast nearby, clothed and clutching a small dog, talking loudly about real estate. And now the rain. |
| HEIDI SEABORN is the executive editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize in poetry. She is the author of three award-winning books and chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Agni, Blackbird, Copper Nickel, diode, Financial Times of London, Penn Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, Plume, Rattle, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com |