Sip the sea. Its salt stays on the tongue.
It burns                              like wine
               the open wound.
It heals.
                Do you have the heart to say
the truth? That it is full of strange bacteria,

indifferent to your pain. I move toward spilling out

but I will not. I will let you think the sea
is sacred still.
                       Perhaps, then,
you will try to save it.

Perhaps you’ll stand with me at the shore,
the sky now darkening, watching
the waves eat back the blueblack dunes,
shadowhills of sand, watching each wavecrash
reverberate, a drum that sounded
centuries ago, each crash a spoon scoop
more of sand, a cat’s rough tongue scraping
land back to waves, thinking, how long
until the world is sea again?
With every stone it swallows,
the ocean grows. When it laps at our
peninsulas, we take it for affection,
quiet in its claws, saying to ourselves,
this is just another sort of love, to wait
to see what happens, to stand there watching
as our feet sink in the sand, arms around each others’
waists, hoodies flapping black in the wind, our mouths
unmoving, patient, tired, only just now widening our eyes.

I like to swim out till I can’t swim more
Until it’s hard to get my breath and in gasping have work to do
Get back to shore
I don’t want to tell you about the girl
Lying abed, my head beside hers
On the white pillow eyes white she said I have not prayed
I have barely ever done that I said don’t worry I have done that for you
I have included you in all the days of my life
All days have been good for praying though it’s hard to believe
That’s all God wants
Shouldn’t He want more in return for all this swanning around in the breeze
Feeling easy in the body
So animal, so wry
I love the purple inside oyster shells but haven’t done a thing to help them
Nothing we can do to earn the mainsail beauty, given every day
And the lifting sea.

". . . tomorrow I look forward to a greater harvest."
     —Charles Darwin, 1832


Month after dry month, then suddenly
a brief rain has delivered to the fractured hillsides
a haze of grass. So sparse it might be
a figment of the heart. Yet its path
on the outstretched hand is true—brush and retreat—
like the breaths of a spaniel.

There are buried in the decks of certain ships
melon-sized prisms of glass, dangling their apices
to the cabins below. Through
their forked, pyramidic ziggings, daylight
is offered to the mess tables, to the tinware,
the gun-gray curlings of salt-tongue.
Not rainbowed at all, the light
approaches the face of each sailor
in segments, like the light in a spine of
train car windows. Then fuses, of course, when it
marries the retina, its chopped evolution

lost in the stasis of the visible.
We turn homeward soon. I remember
the seam lines of southern constellations, and the twin
tornadoes of a waterspout: one funnel
of wind reaching down from a cloud,
one funnel of sea reaching upward. They met
with the waist of an hourglass—in perfect reflection,
as we, through the Archer, the Scorpion, the Painter,
call forth from the evening some
celestial repetition of our shared churnings.

We shattered the spout
with shotguns that kicked like the guns of my childhood
when leaves were a prune-mulch and my sisters
stood at the rim of the orchard.
Katty. Caroline. Susan. Marianne.
In the temperate wind, their dresses and sashes,
the variegated strands of their hair, were
the nothing of wood smoke. Steam.

I cannot foretell our conclusion.

But once, through a pleat-work of waves,
I watched as a cormorant caught and released
a single fish. Eight times. Trapped and released.
Diving into an absence, the fish
re-entered my vision in segments, arcing
through the pivot of the bird's beak. Magnificent,
I thought, each singular visit, each
chattering half-step from the sea.

Visible, invisible,
A fluctuating charm,
An amber-colored amethyst
Inhabits it; your arm
Approaches, and
It opens and
It closes;
You have meant
To catch it,
And it shrivels;
You abandon
Your intent—
It opens, and it
Closes and you
Reach for it—
The blue
Surrounding it
Grows cloudy, and
It floats away
From you.

    At Avenue C below the lifeguard tower,
    That silver body of the coiled bonita

                Flowed with her silver hair, bonita,
                My catch in whose green eyes I saw my face.

    In the surfcaster’s bucket I saw my face
    And hers drawn by the line out of the water,

                We were both living creatures from the water,
                Half-human and half-human on one shore.

    But which of us was welcome on that shore
    Of recognition? Our soles painted with tar,

                Barred at the threshold till we cleaned the tar
                From our bare feet, we both came home.

    She gave me a new word to say for home
    At Avenue C below the lifeguard tower.

We heard the creaking clutch of the crank 
as they drew it up by cable and wheel 
and hung it sleek as a hull from the roof. 

Grennan jammed open the great jaws 
and we saw how the upper jaw hung from 
the skull. We flinched at the stench of blood 

that dripped on the fishhouse floor, and 
even Davey—when Grennan reached in 
past the scowl and the steel prop for the

stump—just about passed out. The limb's
skin had already blanched, a sight none 
of us could stomach, and we retched  

though Grennan, cool, began cutting off 
the flesh in knots, slashing off the flesh 
in strips; and then Davey, flensing and

flanching, opened up the stomach and 
the steaming bowels. Gulls circled like 
ghouls. Still they taunt us with their cries

and our hearts still burn inside us when 
we remember, how Grennan with a tool
took out what was left of the child.

I’d lean close, my ear
to her whisper and roar,
her tongue scattered
with stars.
 
She’d belt her brassy voice
over the waves’ backbeat.
No one sings better than her.
 
Would she ever bite
the inside of her cheek?
 
Would she yell at the moon
to quit tugging at her hem,
or would she whistle, drop
her blue dress and shimmy
through space to cleave
to that shimmer?
 
What did she mean to say
that morning she spit out
the emaciated whale
wearing a net for a corset?
 
All this emptying
on the sand. Eyeless
shrimp. Oiled pelicans.
 
Within her jaws the coral forests,
glittering fish, waves like teeth,
her hungry mortal brine.

a voice speaks 

to rheumy stars

deadpan witness

no call and response

or supplicant's hope

all this hurts

the ocean suggests

as if waves

could privilege

ear's dumb gestures

or a ghost

of a sentence learn

to read its

own dried ink

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking,
 
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
 
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor’s breast
And the harbor’s eyes.