Tonight's Poet Corner: Dearly Departed Traveler

Dearly Departed Traveler

by Belinda Roddie

"I'm flying to Madrid and canoeing

to Greece," he told me over tea in the

cramped café built the middle of a sunset.

He wasn't kidding, either, and they found him

half-submerged in salty debris and driftwood

off the island of Crete. There were waterlogged

laurels in his curly hair.

Two weeks later, his sister bought

a motorcycle and rode all the way

from Boston to San Francisco to meet

me and spread his ashes in the Pacific.

"Not what he would've wanted," she told

me, "but I'm not renting a helicopter

to hover over the Mediterranean Sea." We

exchanged numbers that day. We had sex

for the first time four months later.

When I woke up for the first time in a new

place, I thought about packing just one bag

and camping out in Alaska like Chris McCandless

did, but with less dying involved. Then

I saw her curled up in the sheets beside me,

slightly drooling from the right corner of

her mouth, and I remembered that an adventure

was more fun to read about than to actually have.