text: by Robert Hill Long
  Begin with a woman in her doorway—
  nightgown and loose robe, the spill
  of light from her living room. It’s still less day
  than night. Fog scrims the hills,
  muffles the black surf below. She looks west.
  Wherever she touches a hand
  to her body—forehead, cheek, breast—
  is a wing applied to a wound.
  In the doorway’s dim parenthesis
  she lets out ghosts, to burn off
  like the fog. There’s no kiss
  better than the sun’s; it will come soon enough.
  And you, why are you watching her? The woman
  facing you is a door. Wake up. Go in.
  In rain, the doves don’t call. Let
  the Pacific resume its master narrative—
  they blink away the details. Around each eye
  a lapis ring chains sky
  to sea. They utter a rivulet
  of distances, yet live
  at your feet. After the flood they flew
  here because better than
  any surviving thing they heard converging
  waves of blue upon black upon blue,
  moon upon sun upon moon.
  They are the perfecting
  of that echo. Their wings in the grass
  that buoys your feet are rainclouds. Let them pass.
  Trailing coastal rubbernecks, she descended
  into a cave vibrant with the roar
  of breakers and sea lions. Her eyes
  stung with salt wrack, bodies black
  as torpedoes made of fishmeal and bilge-water.
  Once it was a sanctuary; marketing sleaze
  made it a zoo. The adults avoided eye contact;
  pups stared, refugees behind wire. She ended
  her part by turning away. But she
  had paid her fraction for the upkeep of this
  franchise crowded as the bowels of a slave ship
  turned amusement ride. She came up to the clean kiss
  of sky, stepped into the road and was nearly hit
  by a truck hauling the trunk of a redwood tree.
  Kill me in the water or kill me on the sand.
  Kill me among the spruces on the cliff.
  She was praying in a church without roof
  or walls, crying hard. She could not stand.
  In the zigzag of dead things at tideline
  she sank. Kill me with sky black with rain
  or cold blue going black and empty.
  But she did not push her way into the sea.
  Hard, hard to pierce the perpetual
  noise at the edge of the world. The cold ache
  in her knees was telling her to break,
  break. No, she was not whole or well
  but her fingers held one another, aware
  that she was asking to live forever.
  Robert Hill Long has published 6 books and won numerous awards, prizes and fellowships—including 2 from the National Endowment for the Arts.
  Raised in North Carolina, he was founding director of the NC Writers Network, and afterward taught in Massachusetts, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.
  He lives with his wife Linn Van Meter in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.