I
Dancing from an ocean
singing the birth of a child's scream
I hear the double fluted echo
Of a life, a death
I cannot console. A gull's shadow turns,
wind cracking its frayed end
against a slow separation
dancing from the dancer.
I feel the swelling, the movement.
I stand, shivering;
and the sky, bruising easily
shudders with each descending gull:
I shout: and echoing the reckless invisibility
of their flight
I feel the rushing
rubbing against my hardened gaze.
The purple dusk, veins of cloud
collapse exhausted.
II
A child cries from the breakers
and I stand, waves buckling against my knees,
not knowing where to enter,
where to console.
The tide comes, or it goes;
and I feel the hard veins of a dream
turn on the sand.
I hear distant birth of ocean,
a southern cross twisting
in the northern sky,
and the rain.
A gull stumbles, cries,
shifts its weight; and I stand
a wrinkled statue bending into seawater,
remembering the hands, cold on my groin,
hands slowly carving.
III
Drinking the wind in exhaustion
the body sways to strange music. The wet ground
shifts with my gaze;
and turning, a grizzled prospector of images,
I feel the hardwood
soft to my core; and I feel,
brittle like my bones,
the hardening;
and turning again,
rubbing dark salt from the waves, my imagination
wirls in the steady air.
The slow untangling of my sexual strength
carves another reopening:
and rebirth, a strange consequence,
strains, howls into hardened song.