East Coast

Excerpts from The Familiarity

This poem ‘East Coast’ will feature in my forthcoming publication ‘The Familiarity’.

The Familiarity
The Familiarity is a poetic meditation on the evolving landscape of long-term love—its quiet devastations, its unnoticed beauty, and the way intimacy can both sustain and suffocate. It explores how marriages can move from the thrilling beginning to the transactional middle, where perhaps we forget who we both were, and have become.

The poems pose the questions, is there anything greater than falling in love with the same person twice? But to get there, how much do you have to fall out of love?

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East Coast.

There were more moments than I cared to remember
when I’d fly east—toward the land of towering pillars—

twelve endless hours of boarding and disembarking,
and every time, I knew it was over.

Removing my wedding band—a silent renunciation—
leaving a finger, uncrowned, dethroned, bereft.

I had long passed the point of rage; sorrow had grown trivial,
our marriage occupied a quiet, gentle acceptance, a shared silence.

It baffled me how, on the vast east coast of this spinning sphere,
it took nearly as long to fly back to Cascadia

as to return to my homeland of England.
The deceptive curvature of this eroding earth, nothing is ever straightforward.

Each flight felt like I was standing at a crossroads—
each time, flying with hope, only to have it dashed,

caught between the darkness of coal and the brilliance of diamond.
There is one day I cannot forget:

as outside, the cottonwoods stooped toward our house,
raining their sticky buds over our decking

You cursed these resinous arrows, upset
brushing them with a fervor not seen for years.

Returning inside, I watched the tears fall
As you asked, “What do I want?”

and I was rendered mute—
how does one answer when, at times,

all you crave is an end, not an escape,
but a weary resignation to the endless routine.

I still look back on those days, wondering
what tethered us then, and what binds us now.

I used to joke that I stayed only to spare another
the weight of my past—

to never burden any lost soul again.
The endless retelling of old tales, my contradictory habits:

One day a poet, the next a fighter, one hour the comedian, the next a sage;
the raw, sexual, mouth-breathing vitriol.

the snoring that so often filled the silence.
And her—my counterpart—

with her mythology, her stories, her dreams, her nature-born tardiness,
her fragile constitution and obstinate refusal

to do anything without her own quiet rebellion.
In the end, we become accustomed to what we tolerate

In the end, we tolerate what we both have become.

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