Ode to Vacation

Ticket away
from the day I keep having.
Blue black crevasses
in the little calving glacier
of my life. You help me
hear the insanities
in all that I keep
doing despite the wideness
of the generous invitation
to be truly alive.
I gorge on emails
while Yosemite waits.
The Algarve is ripening
more grass for golden bales of hay
as I don’t call my father
who is still here, but deep in his years.
I could ask him anything
but I won’t if you won’t
take me awhile, away
from how I live.
I forget how
my bedroom smells
when I sleep in it too long.
I lose the jasmine of it,
my wife’s lotion, and our tired, dirty socks.
But then, Jamaica. But, Paris.
A week in a little cabin
gives me back my nose.
You return the strangeness.
You make coffee exotic again.
You are like the accident
that opens me to saying no
to my poorer yesses.
I couldn’t love my own
dishes, forks, or spoons anymore.
They were plain, had become
just things, again. But now
that I’ve had prawns
and scallops in sight of the boat
that brought them, now I’ve eaten
inside the smell of the ocean again,
I can savor oatmeal in my old bowl.
In your hugeness of all
that isn’t mine
in your endless corners
to find, to explore,
I remember how good
the key is when it turns
in my peeling blue door.