A Pelt of Beaches

Among the Transbaikal Tungus a child is selected and brought up to be a shaman. After a certain amount of preparation he undergoes the first trials; he has to interpret dreams, demonstrate his ability in divination, and so on. The most dramatic moment comes when the candidate, in ecstasy, descrdibes just what animals the spirits will send him so that he can make a costume from their pelts. Long afterward, when the animals have been hunted and the costume made there is a new assembly; a neindeer is sacrificed to the dead shaman, the candidate puts on his costume, and he peforms a “great shaman song.”

— Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstsay

***

... Suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice in that untempted life presenting undisquieting problems, invested iwth an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.

— Joseph Conrad, “The Secret Sharer: An Episode from the Coast”

***

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and our origins,
In ghoslier demarcations, keener sounds.

— Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order At Key West”


***

A PELT OF BEACHES

Feb. 17, 2006

I spent years pickling my
noodle in the wantons
of hi-proof woe, sitting on
barstools so singular in
my dement. For many
years after I’ve been
rolling my tongue in the brine
of those rude waters, as
if the later reveries
are the true brogue I was
angling for in rolled
and crashing booze.
What’s changed except
the angle of derange,
my collapsing narrowed
to the hips of a paper song,
fucking to its harrows
a night now ages long?
Poem after poem I’ve
assembled the pelts
of the animated tribe
that taught me the breakage
inherent in low swoon,
furry jezebels with mewly
voices who unzippered
me to the ravages
a pure and naked night
no waking brain can measure
nor aging man occlude.
What I’ve become is
an amalgram of their
their dank hot closures,
my pursuit as wide
as the state of Florida
and long as the state
of its disease, plunging
down and through
the gap in sense and
all stability, clasped
by the knees of crashing
seas. This is carnal knowledge,
gleaned from a book
whose pages are composed
by all those panties lost
in the covers of a drowned
bed, an unbrassiered sapience
where sun and moon swing
high in feral unison
across undying skies.
This long beach I wake
and walk is pounded by sighs
lucent and brilliant and torrential
all at once—and that is just
the visible part of its heart,
a marge of risible blue.
My coutre is pure accoutrement,
an outre fizz down champagne
necks uncorked so many
poems back the buzz and
thrash have ebbed far
down, as oolites of
an ululation long
jacked of all elation,
ossifying salt to stone,
my bride’s election to
a far stouter realm
which throngs the oldest
mead-hall where all
eternity comes to drink.
I’m just a motley maudlin
still mooning in the surf,
pruned to leather by
the sun, no longer the brown
child of summer I once
sought to become
but some merry older mentor,
my dominion autumn tropics.
I write here with one hand
on the surf-pole and the
other in my shorts,
both fishing for the gill god
who still roars and rears and snorts
the songs of summer’s spleen.
I am the fool of ten thousand
barstools who’s still knocking back
the tide, my thirst for her so deep
no bottle, song, or woman is
wide enough to slake
the salt germanes I ride.
Not even the sea is wild
enough to pelt the beaches
I here wear though
it must somehow suffice,
shoring once again
that brutaller tensed blue
which serenely sirens You.


***

MOTHER OF PEARLS

2002


Brilliant sands reach back
toward a distant shimmer
where I recall white afternoons
and your voice above the sea’s.
Weaned in that bright music,
I have always loved words
which sing of that relation,
each line a surf between
you and I, cresting and curving
into us in foaming chords of joy.
Each poem I write is a pearl
sown from that cerulean wash,
a beach of adulation.
No wonder I ate all that sand.
I’m a voice now of that
restless, crashing land,
reaping your white songs
grain by patient grain,
the rest of my life long.

***


BAPTISM

2003

A low voice crooned in his ear:
a bittersweet song it was, passing-sweet,
passing-bitter.
— Fiona McLeod, “The Washer of the Ford”

At 13 I was baptized in the Atlantic
off Melbourne Beach by pentacostals,
an occasion which was strangely
perfect in its timing. Months earlier
I’d been given a tract which showed
the hells of sin: a blue novella of once-

good people deceived by pleasure into
grave of boozy sex and all the fanged
conceits which fork there, ending up
in the halls of pitch and apostate ire.
It scared the Bejezus into me just when
I was ready at last for the world: puberty

had just slammed its flaming wreck into
me, adding three inches of height, burning
off my childhood fat, curling out a brimstone
beard pubic hairs, lowering my voice a
gravelly half-octave.Poised at last for the
eternal pleasures of youth, their infernal

consequences bared their canines wide,
revealing an endless maw. Terrified of
punishment I fell on my knees and gave
myself to the God of the group who’d
passed the track. It was with these people
that I now drove out to Melbourne Beach

on a warm morning in early June, two months
from my 14th birthday. We sang Christian
songs in that packed station wagon, the windows
rolled to a predawn lurid Florida smelling of
citrus, death, and the sea. I was flanked by two
virginal girls, a chaste inch between our bathing

suited bottoms, literally just enough to spare
the devil’s bray. Still, when the car rolled over
a dead mole or ‘dillo, the jot caused the left girl’s
left breast to bounce against my arm, and
the chorus in the car turned to a drone while
I felt that deeper music thrum, the hard rock

of rages which was all thirst, all sweet, all
consummation. Parked on the beach at last
we exploded from the car like colts, sprinting
in joy toward a surf which curled and broke
in the glass of first light. Somehow I managed
to leap and come down on the very spot where

some manowars were buried, leeching my soles
in ocean fire. For an hour while the others romped
and bodysurfed I lay on a picnic table in pure
agony. I prayed God forgive me for the imp inside
me and gave thanks that I didn’t have the chance
fall further in that surf. When I was well enough

to walk, I was led to the surf where the service
began — standing waist high in cerulean, warm
surf with the sun just up from the east, still red
with first birth, the pastor next to me with eyes
shut tight, praying in tongues and then shifting
to English to say God bless this new son. He then
he tipped me back into the water and held me there —

only for a second or so — but while I was under
a cleansing wave passed over and through me, calm
and eternal and silently true. To this day, I swear
it was one of the closest moments I’ve had with God.
Or gods, since the wave passed under me as well,
washing me of every wrong and blessing of my darkest,

deepest joys — angel and imp, agape and eros, spirit
and soul married in that douse which washed through
and then passed and I was hauled back up spluttering
while the others clapped and praised God. The sun
continued to climb in the sky, hot and beckoning,
as the rollers sprawled in again and again and again,

curving and smashing and hauling back our blent blood,
waxing and ebbing, cleansing us in the sea’s feral mud.

***

IS THIS LOVE THAT I’M FEELIN’?

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000


Summer 1980:
Luckless with
musicians
and more
enamored of
what blossomed
after the sun
fell in the Gulf,
I traded my
Music Man
for a stereo:
That’s the
way most of
my art has
gone: flaccidly,
the heart root
never strong
or disciplined
enough to rise
up through current
realities into
the lush verdant
creations above:
Believing as all
children do
that art like
love and money
is supposed
to be effortless:
Once, after
closing down
some luckless
BO Bottomfeeders,
I drove to
Cocoa Beach &
drank coffee
at an I-Hop
til dawn, then
walked on the
beach at first light:
waves rustling
shoreward
in cerulean
pink swells
before the rising
sun: I walked
ankledeep
in warm water
with my shirt
off & jeans
cuffed high as
they would go,
my head filled
with Pat Travers’
version of that
Bob Marley tune
that goes
is this love
is this love
is this love
that I’m feelin ...
And my mood
was mysteriously
question and
answer, strange
because I was
alone and feeling
wonderful: kicking
at gentle waves
with the
eternally lost
and present muse,
the morning breeze
lifting my bleached
blonde hair: Surely
something would
come of this,
I thought,
and did:
Some guy spotted
me from a condo
balcony and
invited me up
for some butt:
A girl up ahead
chased by
cops as she
ran into the
surf screaming
uncontrollably:
surfers batting
around in 1 foot
waves & families
unscrolling from
station wagons
& gulls on
the prowl for
whatever: but
no Becky, ever:
I nearly passed
out driving
my car back
to Orlando
through 50 miles
of superheating
hopeless &
endless scrub
& saw palmetto:
nearly joined
Becky there:
There was
nothing to find
in all of
Florida but
I kept trying,
seeking, asking
the hot sun
is this love
is this love
is this love:

***

DANA BY THE SEA

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000


Summer 1983:
How can it be
that one so in
love with the
plural curves of
a woman which
lavish the day
would find it
so difficult to
be round one
for any length
of time: Dana
and I drove
to Daytona
Beach for the night
in mid-August,
finally time
away from
work and my
band—all
the cumbrances
which I bowered
us in — The
Sheraton Hotel
we stayed in
rife with beer
soaked assholery
all night (vomit
in the elevator
and hall), Dana
outraged at all
the violations
of her Roman cool:
But our room
was nice, 8
floors up &
looking over that
sea which
tongue-and-
grooved my
oceanic need
curl after
heartbreaking
curl: Pushed
Dana back on
the bed late
afternoon with
“Fantasy Island”
on TV: Pulled
off her shorts
& panties &
licked her
pussy along a
long gradient of
slowly mounting
fire, her pubic
hair trimmed
into a pert V
& lips like
glistening pink
gum: She hitting
her peak right
at the moment
that squeak
Herb Villechenze
grunted something
in pig French
on the TV
making her come
come come: I
was trying to
hurry up so
I didn’t have
to hear that guy
she panted, amazed
at how much
lather she built
on my face
averting the
dwarf’s (her
dad was a midget
of sorts, guy
with fake legs
who took ‘em
off to dance on
the bed with
Dana & her
sister: A rare
vulnerable
moment with
her when the
needy child came
up from the
gap to clutch
me desperately:
But laying there
as she returned
the flavor of
gasoline and
sun by swallowing
down my cock
with a sea of
spit and cupping
my balls in a
palm I found
myself too far
out to sea with
no guitar to
paddle: All
my own defenses
against yielding
to a woman’s
way now too
far inland she
slathered &
slithered my
red dong for
all she was worth:
She knew she
had me by the
balls: Knew
she would never
have to suck
so deeply again,
never have to
swallow: I
wanted to just
lay there &
drowse afterward
between the sound
of the surf
& her breath on
my belly but
she was done
with sex & wanted
to shower, dress
up, eat, go see
some bands with
me ever in tow:
Two hours in
the john &
another hour
finding a restaraunt
& two hours
just standing in
a club while bad
bands tried to
play A-list rock,
all of it seeming
so far away, so
casually strange:
The males of
my dad’s line
are all triple
dicked, farm
boys too ruddy
for their own
good: Great grandpa
David gave the
neighbor’s wife
a quarter for sex
& played a fiddle
so sweetly he
got inside a
lotta ladies
knickers: Burnt
his fiddle one
day in some
passing mood
of guilt: fathered
12 kids: One
of em my
grandpa William
Senior loved that
sex but refused
to father much:
Forced my grandma
to have 7 or
so abortions:
Just my dad
and his sister
survived & they
were separated
by 8 years:
My dad loved
that male monster
so much he carried
on with me in
a closet for
years only
having sex with my
mother at the
full moon when
he was drunk
& most weakened:
I’m a “soft male”
by Bly’s definition,
sucker for a
suckling breast:
Prone to losing
all my edges in
a woman’s curves:
Can surrender
or defend against
but never find
a way to live
in the middle
ground of
briared roses:
Without a
guitar for one
weekend in ‘83
I found myself
too close to the
ocean & in thrall
with a woman
who was cool &
cruel & beautiful
as we watched
some band play
wretched metal
while I drank
beers & she drank
Cokes & we talked
of forming our
own band &
touring the world
over: The next
day we woke
with the sound of
the sea washing
in our bodies with
a salty sigh but
Dana would have
none of the
oceanic equivalents
I offered her
along the length
of my aching cock:
Instead we went
down to lay
out on two deck
lounges by a
pool amid a
hundred others
nursing hangovers
& surrendering
to the pagan
sun, Van Halen
blasting from a
big PA & the
ocean far behind,
mute as all the
old passionate
loves that fell
in it: everything
drowned out
by heavy metal
and the pedestrian
airs of Relationship:
O I couldn’t
wait to get back
to Orlando &
to the cold solace
of my ice Jaguar
and the company
of men who
resist women,
flinging our axes
at the moon &
waiting for them
to fall:

***

WAVE PSALM

2003

I did not return from
that beach a sane man,
happy and free: the
wave that caught me
a dozen yards out
was greater than any
I imagined in my
cold rooms, darker too,
though at root pure
blue: It toppled and
then smashed me
in its marled collapse,
grinding my face in
her packed sand.
Raw and bleeding
with a mask of
salt smarts, I rose
to strand in that
vespering surf,
a man no longer in
love with his summer
verbs, rather a lover
now whose cross
crests and breaks
two million times
a day. My scarred
length is a vocable
hurled on a tongue
of salt insatiety;
each morning when
I spout these lines
they bleed an
abyssal ire, a chum
of Moby Dick, Maeldun,
and that Roxy tune
which goes “I will
drink my fill/Till the
Thrill is You.” It’s
a wet ill cocquina walls
can never quite hold
back, much less heal.
I have no idea where
this poem is going,
yet such voyaging
is my oar and compass,
tracking inward from
one sea’s way of
knowing (all grapple,
anchor, harpoon)
into a wavelike,
dark blue gnosis,
gathering up whatever
drift in from
the next salt door,
holding it high
to whisk its white foam,
smash it on today’s
paling shore, and
retrieve and hold
what so achingly
ebbs through my
hands, milking that
sad long kiss
as it slowly fades
to a thundering hiss.



***

BAPTISED AT EBB TIDE

2005

I was baptised at ebb-tide
on the last day of my childhood;
the receding wave which
caught me there has ferried
me at last to here, a man
both of the shore-walking world
and of waters brined by God
with salt’s hard misery,
stinging every bliss with
a bottomless undrinkable.
Your ebbings have defined
my ways, always leaving
me alone to name the flood
which drowned every bed
I’d shored on nights before,
filling my mornings with
that empty dripping soft
blue door still resonant
with the cantakerous roar
which wakened in our kiss.
Each beach-song I
carve here is a nautilus
of your curvelike curse,
woven in the rounded way
you turned to me then
turned away; curvelike
the song rounds down
through the misery of
dry and drier nights
grinding down, like old
sand poured through
a wave-smoothed glass,
into these roundelays
of surflike refrains
upon a paper strand
where verbals wash, leaving
me at last again at the far
white end of every beach
you woke me on. On those
fragile magic sands
I leave this shell-seeming shell
for you to find again,
long after I have washed
out to ring the bronze of hell.
How best to return
the wave that bittersweetened
all with its cathedral
rise and smash
careening wild in foam
than to harrow full
the quiet draw in
every pre-dawn dark,
recalling every man
baptised at ebb who
drowned in love’s
reclaiming wave?
Such dead are like
seaweed at low tide,
green glyphs of
what remains, drained
and flattened of
their former flout
of spermatic equine fire:
Read me in that wild
blue latinate the
same tenor which
the selkies sing from
their black rocks,
of sea and shore
dreams inked. I am
a man long ebbed
from North Sea smash
where just the song
of foam remains,
stingingly unrepentant
in the wilderness
of that recede which
wombs the next blue
to drown the likes of me
in you.


***

BLUE IN GREEN

2002


The song enters
gently, almost
painfully so:

Bill Evans on piano
washing in the
night’s minor chords
toward a shore
with no resolution,
blue rollers composed
of the lightest,
most fragile notes,
hesitant as all
who stand at midnight’s door
with so much flowing in
from the night:

And then Miles enters
on trumpet almost too late
in the progression,
not quite an afterthought
but still way after what
ever could have mattered,
that emphysemic
horn thin and spectral
over the wash of minor chords,
hovering like fog over the surf’s
embarcations, wedging us
between what’s
half in and
half out that door
we all hesitated at,
turning for a last long
look back on all we loved and lost
and then lost even more:

There’s no real name for it,
but the feeling is blue in green,
the bittersweet thrall
inside sweet sound;
not the sweetness, but
the crash of that sweetness
when it’s forever gone.

Evans never loses his infinite
restraint throughout,
strolling out those calm,
almost-suicidal progressions
of minor beachside ennui
over which Miles sighs and
sings with a breezy, diffident,
nearly frozen reserve.
Together they weave and sum
the night’s concessions
and conceits,
none of them good or even
passing for a temporary stay
against the facts of dissolution.
Back and forth they
toss that rigorous tao,
ever returning us to
this hard shore:

Then like a long ache
quenched in a needle’s whiteout,
Davis fades off, leaving Evans
to finish things:
The piano climbs that
trellis of sad chords
once more, reaching an even
higher, almost
impossible—
no—
irretrievable height: —then spills
back down
the clef to us
in a quick play
of gorgeous
major thirds,
just as waves will travel
across the world only
to collapse on the shore,
scattering jewels
at our feet before
hauling them all away
in a last low ebb
of minor chords:

“Blue In Green” names
that hard night’s surf
where we lose more than
we ever love, and in so
descending find
that harsh blue door
which scatters us
on a distant
emerald shore.


***


CRYSTAL SHORES

2004


Again and again I walk
these crystal shores
where you and I
once met and since
and ever dream.
The tide here is swift
and vast and
septiernally one to one
in its scrolling psalter
of wave after wave,
each one curved and curled
with your every latent
lucency, each one
crashing to crystal
smithereens on that
pale sand, erasing
the prints our feet
left behind. I voyage
every day day from this
white chair to that
pale shore where night
hauls back its sheets
revealing the palest of
pale blues around your
ankles, like moon-glazed
wavelets of ice or
the filaments of your eyes
which lit on me and lured
me out to drown the bottom
of all seas. All that remains
today is the music of that
motion at the wild
shore of an ocean
I’ll never see again,
much less walk hand
in hand ensouled with you.
I became the man you
dreamed you saw
that high cathedral night,
a rogue wanderer
no more, by days the
firm husbandman of love,
in early morning matins
a monk writing down
a crystal-seeming sound
on pages that go deeper
and beyonder than
I ever had real balls to go.
Your fantasy became
the phantasm who burned
through all my years
like a torch, leading me
beyond those ghostly
ghastly wastes where
you never to be found
into this shire of wet
surrender where you
are so meltingly afoot,
so fleetingly agleam.
Here the moon of our
imagined history ignites
each massive wave
I ride toward you
& the smashing tumult of
that foam keeps that
heart—or its memory— alive.
I’m happy to leave you
here with the offshore breeze
flinging your soft hair
& my song secreted
away inside your black
silk selkie’s thunder-
underwear: To shut
the covers of this
bone-white book
and head upstairs
to join my wife in bed,
telling her how much I
love her as I slowly
stroke her feet: And let
the day slowly wash
in through our big windows
to name our married
day where I’m growing older
and have so much work
left to do. That jazzy
blue periphery that you
and I walked once
is the sweet and simple
liturgy I daily ring, like a
crystal angelus. Lauding
each wave’s kiss of
noctilucent noir, adding
it to that one, incessant,
vastly booming choir.


THE POEM AS
A BEACH BEFORE DAWN

2004

The ancient image of Our Lady in
the Lady Chapel in the Church of
Notre Dame at Granville in Normandy
was found on the shore of Cap Lihoo.
It was set up in its own chapel, and is
still the focus of a pardon on the last
Sunday in July called “Grand Pardon
des Corporations et de la Mer.”

— Nigel Pennick, Celtic Sacred Landscapes

My job as I see it is to vigil the matins
of this waking summer shore and receive
what the sea deigns to return to me:
To sing each day’s arrival with the tide,
building a white chapel in which a
freight grows sacred and is altared,
incensed, believed, hosanna’d. I never
know just what I’ll find here — a dream
perhaps, or some memory loosed
from the well, or a resonant bit of story.
I let the sea decide. I just walk here
on the moony sound while the surf
crashes silver milk at my feet, nursing
my inner ears and eyes. And even that’s
imagined as I sit in this chair in my
house squat in town, the dark outside
a cat’s attentive drowse. My job is to
make of that a beach I walk, and believe
I’ll find down its sandy lane the very
shape the next song needs. See: there
ahead a clump winnowing a receding
wave: the beached masthead of
a long-split ship, trailing in her hair,
a bit of barnacle kissing her faded lip.
She was carved two centuries ago
from the likeness of Our Lady in
which was washed ashore two centuries
before, a rebirth of the mother of the
Celtic gods, herself found in a tide-pool
three thousand years before, delved
from goddesses whose names drowned
many thousand years further back.
But their tidings all remain, as well
the shore which here washes down
the lengths of journal-paper. My job
is to hear that surf inside and give it
here a beach where devotees like me still
walk in the nuptials of the coming day,
my pen across the page the wet part
of the sea, what she bids shore in me.

wave rave

from “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

The present/
Autumn 1985:
The wave the sea
woman dashed
on me in the
welcome of
a few melusines
has baptized me
into a curve
and curl, an
arch foam
ache and break:
I accept today
that such loves
may have only
been moonbeams,
faulty ego
boundaries &
juvenile whim:
But the wave
itself is
one of the greater
angels, a titanic
motion swelling
up to kiss the
moon: One night
many years later
I walked Cocoa
Beach with a
woman Donna’s
age long after
Donna swam away:
A full moon
high above a
surf impossibly
stirred by a
hurricane
200 miles
out to sea; Waves
like we had
never seen at
that timid beach
scrolling in
huge dark swells
& the smash
& hiss of surf
a dull pounding
blissful roar:
Silver milk
in those waves
poured from
a crazy moon
& a stiff warm
breeze blowing
through the desire
we felt for each
other but could
not, would not
touch for the ties
she kept with
another: A
dazzling night
in which we
were gifted
with a sea so
few would ever
see: Some time
after midnight
on that silvered
beach where
angels sang
brokenly & eternally
of desire and its
terrible torn
beauty we stopped
talking & listened
& looked
& touched each
other’s hand, just
once, hugged,
just once, kissed
for a second then
turned to go:
I wrote a poem
on it and later
set the night
to music on
a keyboard
synthesizer (no
guitar could
suffice, I’ve learned)
tolling these
slow sure chords,
Emaj7 - Cmin7
F#min7 - Amaj7,
composing wave
after wave
of basso bellows
& swelling strings
& dazed dreamy
overtones caught
in the suck and
the roar of
a remembered night:
O I’m still
desperate to
describe the wave
of the sea woman
rising in me
in you impossibly
high fraught
with the ache
and plunge of
perfect union,
sure in its
rhythm & pulse
& chording &
broken utterly
when cusp trembles
foams & turns
down at the
moment of coming
falling weightless
for aeons in a
sheer glass curve
collapsing in a
smash and a
roar into oblivion:
I’m 43 now
and doubt
any such wave
does more than
shipwreck &
estrange us from
all we build and
strive for in
such difficulty:
No marriage
abides by such
a wave, no
poems or songs
ever summon
it truly back &
it’s an utterly
selfish amoral
unworthy
unwholesome
surrender no
one else in the
world gives
one tiny turd for:
Yet I desired
her & she kissed
me with that wave
& I can’t stop
this furious scrawl
down the page
mounting this
babel of joy:
Yesterday in
the spinning class
the instructor
was both lovely
& cruel, asking
us to pedal
harder faster up
an impossible
slope: It was
then that I truly
saw the wave I here
praise, this fearsome
nor’easter of a
swell curving
up high high
and higher,
mountainous to
moon: Oh
the teacher was
almost beyond
my heart & I
almost gave out
toward the end,
staying in gear
12 while she called
out 13, 14, 15:
She finally let
us go to
downshift &
pedal mad down
the hill & then
slow & slow
& slow till we
pedalled air
in sleepy arcs:
Of course she’s
this muse that
sirens me out
of too little
sleep & then swims
out just beyond
the tip of this
pen singing, “Come—”:
She was in the
3 or 4 women
who for whatever
reasons undressed
me in her waters
& then drowned me:
She stands beside
the real women
I have actually
loved judging their
passions which
always melt
into a deeper
surer love &
flashes her
booty whispering
“you could have
chosen this, you
know”: I cannot
surrender to
her but I will
not let her go:
Blue green monster
rising sinister
& ecstatic toward
a shore of loins
my balls throb
and pulse for
desperate for just
one smooch of
that hopeless
homeless hocus
hooch of
coochie coo
invoked in this
Breviary, this
blue green wave
reaching for
a fruit I can
never reach,
never burst, till
death do I
truly die: Such
is the passionate
singing I can
no more forget
than the sea
can reclaim it’s
orphaned moon:
Ah desperate
I am this morning
stung and dazed
by the foam of
one wave so
fucking long ago
rising anew here:
And I’m judged
as unworthy now
as I was then:
My hands weary
& aching & tingling
& the loam of
pages fattening
into a mound,
a mountain,
a sea, a cosmos
in the hollows
of a conch, a
pale flickering
dream at the
end of a farewell
& still I can’t
name it or
claim it
nor most of
all let it go:
The woman
of the sea has
exactly what
she wished: And
I her wandering
wounded dolphin
surfer watch the
horizon and wait
for the waters to
heave the next
slow swelling chord: