Wrong Turns In Love Poem by Jesse Ellsbury

The clouds float by in the shapes of memories.

Summer is when the shells surf the waves,
when the decomposed corpses of rocks are reassembled
into castles and then razed by the blades of the tide.

When the white surf rode the buckling blue,
when the liquid floor below us grew and bucked and collapsed like an ox,
we held for dear life as the mud
retreated beneath our slow feet caught in the undertow
and our fingers in the afterglow.

Caught somewhere between the Sahara and Hawaii,
the sands burned holes between our toes
and, like snakes, attempted to swallow our ankles whole
while the soles of our feet arched like cats.
We tiptoed surreptitious, careful not to awake the carnivore heat,
then we cooled our feet in kegs, Coronas caught between our legs,
the hammock saltwater held us, like an oil spill holds an otter.

The asphalt shellacked our feet with tar
to be one with the paved-over earth melted flat by cars
that trolled by locomotive in the industrial night,
the stars putting streetlamps in their place.
The salt of our sweat met the salt of the sea like old friends,
waves crashing into each other with abandoned recklessness
like Romeo and Juliet in a Heaven hot as Hell,
where they met the salt of the earth and melted imperceptibly
into the vaults of forgotten history like wrong turns in love.