Traveler's Poetry

While I've been traveling around I've been writing poetry of course. But I've been writing it from the southern hemisphere.  What with the rest of my family also traveling a bit, I feel like I haven't gotten much feedback recently, so I've waited until things have settled down for them to post again. Here's two poems that have come as a direct result of my traveling; hope you enjoy them!

Swansea

Mine was the only car in the lot and the only room with life:
one chamber in a dying heart.
The innkeeper tore off the map and named the streets
with the lines on my hand.
Offseason, the innkeeper called it, as I looked back to the map
half-filled with vacant hotels.
A simple main road was like the tourists;
it skipped in and out of town, along an empty beach
where I would later walk to listen to the snoring waves
while the day aged.

Even the ocean swelled like a old man:
slowly the water rose from its lung
and slower still it heaved against the land.
The sand was a pale beautiful,
born of the winter breeze and left to defend itself
like the children huddled together
across the road. They pointed at the yachts
like they were stars in the dark,
and then to the cars, that shot across town
on their way up the coast.

Tomorrow I’ll follow past the open farmland,
golden fields, and green valleys.
From season to season fires burn the pines and I imagine incense.
I’ll smell it again,
on the other side of this inlet.
There the view will appear like a scenic churchyard
overlooking Wineglass Bay.
I’ll raise my camera like a toast
and point it at this ghost of a town to say,
“May someone remember you when you’re gone."

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The Other Side of Summer

On the other side of our world, it’s still summer;
I am waiting to catch that plane home
days or weeks away (it feels like years
sitting at this cold breakfast table,
where I feed on the wind for conversation).
I wish my morning breath
didn’t paint mist across the sky,
when I begin to see light on the horizon.
You say the heart of the north glows
and I imagine the smell of oranges,
as ripe, as burning, as the dawn’s own fruit;
the taste stings my eyes as it rises
from a leafless tree of clouds
over the ocean (that gaping mouth
that swallows words and warmth).
I shiver beside your chair, filled with an echo
(I conjure you out of my rotating seasons,
through the center of the earth:
a frozen flame that crackles within me),
that no one else can feel.