I have grown to love this island that ships
pass in the distance so that clouds
and their sails are obscured. Whatever winds
compel the ships are laden with ropes.

The island is inscrutably free of vegetation.
My vision unhindered extends beyond Asia.
Animals I cannot describe cannot be said to prowl;
rather they perform a pavanne on the strand like a carousel.

I have received letters expressing remorse
from acquaintances who rue my isolation;
but there is a bird long thought extinct that soars
above the island and its songs are my inspiration.

What has remained where memory was lost or stolen?
Effacing years replaced what had been felt,
the child adept at stealth and isolation
becoming stranger than the life he left

behind in absence, which was both gone and forgotten.
An echo of a voice in an empty silo rings
because he heard it answer him with words
instead of bruises; the man and child grins.

Remembering selectively, the man
recalls the carcass of a red Case tractor
thigh high in grass; and Viet Nam,
a water buffalo dead in a paddy after

the Viet Cong, like willful parents, spanked
the area with small arms fire. Hell
was neither here nor there but something stank.
The mood rolled over as an odor will

disperse in time, a transient effect
of mind, but an abyss of remembrance haunts
wherever ghosts have congregated, cleft
from the wanton interval of thwarted wants.

Her words are ashes.
As she weeps, each tear is a ghost.

The terrain of their marriage
is a glacial moraine.
Neither weeps but their children
are deposits of sediment.

Solitude widens like a drowning man's eyes
and the lighthouse hovering above the sea cliff
casts nests of imperfect memory
like delirious spiders.