June 2022

June 2022

The girl tells me I am two-thousand-eight-hundred-seventy-one feet above something called the sea.

She misses it, or is maybe missing from it. She does not say. But the sea is the water and the water is the body and the body is the sea. I wonder if she’s labeled this correctly. She says it comes in tides and waves and brews up terrible storms.

Are her eyes so bad she could be talking about the sky? All it’s waving light and tiding figures. I know she’s aware of the moon. She goes out to squint at it and lets the moths in through the screen door.

I won’t ask her what the difference is between one expanse and another. But I’m two-thousand-eight-hundred-seventy-one feet up from the other. And while she misses it, I stand in the swelling summer. I call the swollen wind up from the river. I swim every June afternoon. Everyone has a nice long drink. After the floorboards and cabinets and corner cobwebs get their fill, I send the wet weather upmountain, back to its expanse.

Outside there are caterpillars in the bush. There are grapes just coming in. There are birds too quick to the blueberries so the girl tries them green and sour. There is the small dead snake and the large dead toad and the small things in large numbers coming to finish them off. There is a coming blight through the boxwoods.

We are two-thousand-eight-hundred-seventy-one steps above the sea, but the girl thinks we should watch out. She’s looking for it: over one shoulder, mid conversation, between sips of her drink at a party with only its hosts and a single uninvited guest who she expects to turn the handle. Any second now.

It’s coming our way.

That’s what June is, in a sense. A coming. A girl sleeping on my couch. A not going. Guests that can’t be chased out. A swim. A sea. A water. A body rising up to meet me.

June,

the apple house