The Ballad Of Frances And Amelia/Green Graves And Horeshoe Crabs On The Island Of Seven Flags/New Jersey Turnpike

At night, flowered red crosses she points out while you drive and Robs asleep, markers beside the road reading in painted hand script: "Dave Jeffries 1967-2004" but meaning, "There was someone I loved and they died here and now I am alone."



You drive in quiet in surreal pitch darkness. Outside the drone of cicadas and frog horks while AM radio plays bluegrass, and the singer is singing, "Let's paaass around that long-necked bottle and we'll aaaall go out on a spreeee. Because today's the last of Wild Bill Jones. Tomorrow'll be the last of me."



"That's about you," you say. "You're bad news," and you both laugh and drive on.





The raw animal stink of horseshoe crabs, died on the beach, Florida, Amelia Island Plantation outside Jacksonville, south of Fernandina Beach. Brown salad bowl helmets, prehistoric undersides and long dragon tail, rotting near the shore.



You drag one up on the beach by its tail and flop it over, its belly a chassis of claws and ribbed lobster armor body.



You say, "I'm sorry you died. I'm sorry you're gone."



She's on a towel by the sand dunes, Rob is off on a plane back to San Diego and to work and to life. Her cousin is visiting from Georgia, both pretty and tanned on towels, in the sun, in sunglasses, reading their books.



The driftwood and soap sud sea foam hits your feet.



"I can ignore the past and fake a new name," you tell yourself. Your old name and self and face and life crawling into a mossy green grave to wake up new and smiling and sweaty earth-touched and sun-kissed. Watching yachts off the coast, white dots past crumbling breakers.



"The sea is my brother," you say and laugh insane laughs, shaking with feeling alive.



"Why do you always run at the first sign of trouble, darling?" you think while she lies next to you in the sand on a towel, the smell of sea on her skin, hair warm of coconut



"Why are you afraid to run and why do you let trouble hit you?" she probably thinks— or you imagine so and you feel okay, and flop over and sleep a while in the sand, in Florida



But then it's fog and rain in sheets over Chesapeake Bay, 2 a.m., the slope of Chesapeake Bay Bridge. You left her back in Virginia with a friend, the old lover. Driving alone now to New York.



"Is this freedom?" sings the singer on your tape. "Is it?"



Delaware in the morning, dawn chill to burn off by noon. The beach goers will speed past. Crab-shacks in beach towns, the highway slicked with sand. New Jersey Turnpike, packed and crazy! Voices in the next room, New Jersey motel, muffled, that sound miles away. Bells clang in the nautical ship cry foghorn sad harbor.



and you cast the nets fisherman, cast the nets, cast your nets, what kind of cure is this? a good cathedral