'Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better.' - Robert Frost, 'Birches'. <br /> <br /> <br />For Renee Driver <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />1. <br />The bridge has come together with memory. <br />it is a strange kind of health, not far from <br />the county hospital: river is memory <br />itself; the radio station; the gulls; <br />the salt air, the union, the white Calais; <br />we were fishing. Our rods were our urges. <br /> <br />Remember the drives? The incessant trips? <br />The base of emotion, the music in the <br />mentality: the one motel with <br />no working phone? There was the sky and the belief <br />in it. I called you 'Giggles'. Time held its breath. <br /> <br />Days so hot, shirts came off: nights so hot, <br />the road burned up, like Cambridge and the sun <br />stood together, and the moon, unable to cool <br />this blue, settled town. <br /> <br /> <br /> <br />2. <br />Route 50, the surrogate home! The early <br />90's when it all was new to us, the vital <br />water that passed under the bridge, and through <br />our explorations, struck us, as we stood, staring off, <br /> <br />enlivening briefly, those lives, those days, those eyes, <br />like Shelley, overcome with the idea <br />of water, and the feel of it: turgid blue. <br />We drowned, yet eluded the inconvenience of doom.<br /><br />Lamont Palmer (Lamont Palmer)<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-choptank-river/