2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

Cul-de-Sac
by Richard Robbins
He made a wish, finally, the veins of his hand run to the sea.
He made a wish the red moon cruel.
He talked to the home on the short street ending at a circle. He smelled
oleander leaves, the dust falling there from sky. He talked to the
Chinese elm, to the ghost of a white dog, the outlawed incinerator,
to the versions of boy walking in and out the door.
He walked into an empty church next to the ocean. Each candle flickered
in wet air, a kind of speech. A kind of speech, he prayed to no one
at the altar. He bowed to the polished stone.
He walked, finally, across sand, past living and dying gulls, past flea, past
marbles of tar, to the thumbnail moons of foam.
He tasted their salt. Not iron, not evil, not a long disappointed message
from lunar dark. Just a mineral he could bathe in, those two vowels
only an angel—rubbing two halves of a man together—knows how
to say.
98 Santa Fe Literary Review