Ruby Tuesday

(For J&C)

You said “Goodby Ruby Tuesday” to me 
before clicking the lid shut 
on your jewel-box car –

redlining home with your heist
in the passenger seat, her hair 
the theft of every red sky at morning

warnIng you of the storms ahead.
But you had wound and knotted my vision 
to a rocket – gravity harpooned to its soul –

spoutIng fire into water-black sky
in its fury to escape the barbs 
set by iron laws of the land.

My heart caught in the coils –
a Nantucket sleighride dragging me skyward 
away from the river, the estuary, the sea,

the whale-road home –
instead of sanctuary,
you – if you call me Ishmael, I will call you Ahab –

sank us on the graveyard moon
where you filled coffee cans 
with ashes of the dead.

If I fall to my knees next to you and dig,
dig all the way to China,
will I find scrimshaw runes of my mother and father 

written on bones?
Will my lips be caked with dust
from kissing the lunar ground 

where I was tossed ashore
by the Sea of Tranquility
in a  meteor storm?

Will you find your lost limb
when you hobble to the trunk of your car 
In the moonlight?

Back in our story a ruby slipper
was still on her foot
when her leg washed onto the rocks.

Like me, she must have clicked her heels 
three times
and said “there’s no place like home”

so we could sleep with the fishes
and dream of rivers and the sea
where what we’ve lost sinks out of sight

to where there is no light –
where like a blind fish, 
my hair luminous,

waving in the merman dark  –
I ask her name 
and there is no reply.

For Desperate Poets OLN (and Desperate Crossings)

For Ruby Tuesday prompts