The setting sun’s golden shapes
dart about the tiny fiefdom
of a parking lot
where I am talking
to myself again when
I should be listening
to the blades that squeeze
up through the cracks.
They may have
important things
to tell that I should know
like how to stake
a claim to life
in this forsaken world.
And though the night and I
just shrugged them off,
look now how
I remember them.
. 
When our kids grew up and left,
one at a time, with each we
wonder the same things:
what are they eating,
what are they wearing.
How do they spend their nights
without us.
The house more silent with each
departure. When the last one drives away,
all of California grows still.
We still have each other to talk to,
my man likes to say, and then we talk
about the kids, what they might be wearing,
where they might be going.
And he likes to say, Come, let's have dinner.
We can still have dinner.
And so we have dinner and talk
about the old dinners,
what they liked to eat and what not
when we used to have family dinners.
And he also likes to say, Come let's take a walk.
We can still take a stroll.
And so we stroll past a meadow
where kids play soccer,
past a playground
with kids on slides.
The day we clear out the last room,
our son says, Keep the yearbooks,
the trophies, the snowboards.
All that childhood flotsam now
stacked neatly in the dark.
The boy next to me
eats from a bag of fast food
without looking up
from his phone.
I who does not exist
now am free
to aim my camera
at his long curls
My thoughts simple with wonder:
When did he become this new thing?
A little man at age 14
now precisely wears those jeans.
For years the boy says, I love you
every time he leaves the room, ever since
the parents dropped from sight
while he crawled like a crab
across the sand.
Last summer I saw the man coming when
his sentences ran shorter, words flew out
I'd never heard, he hummed along
to Lil this and Lil that
and his hair styles grew
more interesting.
I was not awake that first time
he crossed the border
without me to his new life.
The shorebirds call out
from the Bay
--more beings I cannot understand--
And I hear a small voice,
a distant foghorn at dusk,
I love you grandma.
He gives me one eye, one ear
but only if I raise my voice.
I don't want to raise my voice
but if I don't, his mind drives off
into the backroads and hides.
At some point, I ask myself
should I let him be a gamer, fail
school, pay his dues?
His cat would starve if
I don't feed him. He says
let him hunt mice or just
return him to the SPCA.
Kids can only love so long.
Just ask the cat and me.
,
Tonight I pine for my former happiness.
I admit there was pain in all of it too
but I scorn all those tears--they taught me
what gladness is.
There was that afternoon we drove along the coast,
Bill Evans CD the perfect soundtrack,
we are barely talking, so at ease
with the presence of the other.
I don't know what thoughts waft
through his mind but I see his calm, his
contentment marks a faint smile on his face.
All the signs of a man in love with life.
We stop to stroll a path along the bluffs
high above the sand and blue below.
his hands slack in both pockets
and eyes glisten with a deep joy.
We return to the car and I want to make love
right then and there
but he would not risk such exposure,
being a man who holds dignity dear
and so I merely place a finger on his cheek,
on that amazing malar bone handed down
to him by Aztecs--his beauty cut
a wound in me that will not heal.
Suddenly we drive past fields and fields
of yellow giants--my eyes spinning
pinwheels and voice repeating,
look! look! look!
But my boys do not look up
from their bleeping phones because
it's just a bunch of flowers
spreading through the meadow
by the thousands, faces to the sun
like flowers everywhere.
No matter the giants stand in perfect rows
like China's Terracotta Army.
They are too quiet to impress.
If only they were crowing
and butting, if only they were
rushing toward us and exploding,
the boys might want a better look
and lift their beeping phones to
maybe take a picture
or two.
