I was with the ocean last night and your body
Was its vessel, overflowing.  Words were frail,
Drops indwelling about the shapeless sky,
Water reaching for its own height and breath,
Like touch, were as desperate letters exchanged,
Endlessly read, until like loamy vellums, they
Disappeared in our hands.  Inklings of tide-
Pool and driftwood.

                               My blood was a river that ran
Its course.  Members feeding your deltas and birds
Breeding where the water-russet sheds on pampas
And inverness.  Eyes like wing through ever—
Green, empties the fossil shell.  Fire, brimming
Mountaintops that were, for countless millennia,
Sleeping.  Did I mention that the earth moved?
No?  Her displacement was involuntary.

Then came the waterfalls, lifting throughout
Time.  The scent, searching for its identity,
The wave, calling to its own name— Ocean,
O— cean.  And flowers, opening like galaxies
In the after-light.  A universe of face and hand
With hunger for salt-rain and then the cloud
Burst-blue and spilt and spun more redolent,
Deities, in joyous creation.

I breathe, in your ocean, like a child unborn.

There's a fog over Inverness,
Wrapping the banks
Of the river Ness;
Enveloping me
As you once did.
A fog that will not dissapate,
A mist that mirrors
The break and ache.
A fog that chides
Lonely distress.
This fog can't hide
What I can't forget.

In nights when
a crisp humidity
wraps its
cocoon-
Jolts within me
suddenly
thoughts of a cove
where as a
child,
scattered clandestine
words-
burrowed on their
own
into the pallid sand
who soaked herself
with salty sea,
then pledged confidentiality...
until I grew,
and could take
it.

So
Burn
Inverness.
Let the whispered
die
and with you
firefly
ethereally toward night.
One can merely
hope
not a single soul
will catch
one
here nor
there...
though what's
there
to fear?
Only that which is
deeply known:
I was,
I am,
a child still-
never grown.

Red sky,
hide
stowaway embers;
remains
fallen from youthful lips.
Let ride away on
bobbing crests.
At low tide,
an even lower
soul
walks the shallows.

The lovely lass o’ Inverness,
Nae joy nor pleasure can she see;
For e’en and morn she cries, “Alas!”
And ay the saut tear blins her ee:
Drumossie moor—Drumossie day—
A waefu’ day it was to me!
For there I lost my father dear,
My father dear, and brethren three.

Their winding-sheet the bluidy clay,
Their graves are growing green to see:
And by them lies the dearest lad
That ever blest a woman’s ee!
Now wae to thee, thou cruel lord,
A bluidy man I trow thou be;
For mony a heart thou hast made sair
That ne’er did wrang to thine or thee.

Rose of your ear,
Lantern in your eyes,
Forest of branching hair,
In Inverness of your midlands,
I shall broach lit vernal deltas,
Kiss deep into darkling depths,
Climb the leaved trunks of thigh,
Drunk in the moisted, muted sighs
Of promise, tendered to surrender,
I shall know your ripened *******,
As bloom of moon paints moons
At night, I will be ****** in milk—
That offers itself to leeching babe,
With little, lithe fingers you rake one,
A wan vagabond, *****, homeward,
I shall know your flowing wetness,
Below my desert, with purpose,
I am lost, in sleep and dream,
May I never wake, may I
Sleep, never, may eye
Always open, keep
In tableaus of oil,
Strokes, hues,
Glittering
Of you.

.
Rose of your ear,
Lantern in your eyes,
Forest of branching hair,
In Inverness of your midlands,
I shall broach lit vernal deltas,
Kiss deep into darkling depths,
Climb the leaved trunks of thigh,
Drunk in the moisted, muted sighs
Of promise, tendered to surrender,
I shall know your ripened *******,
As bloom of moon paints moons
At night, I will be ****** in milk—
That offers itself to leeching babe,
With little, lithe fingers you rake one,
A wan vagabond, *****, homeward,
I shall know your flowing wetness,
Below my desert, with purpose,
I am lost, in sleep and dream,
May I never wake, may I
Sleep, never, may eye
Always open, keep
In tableaus of oil,
Strokes, hues,
Glittering
Of you.

I was with the ocean last night and your body
Was its vessel, overflowing.  Words were frail,
Drops indwelling about the shapeless sky,
Water reaching for its own height and breath,
Like touch, were as desperate letters exchanged,
Endlessly read, until like loamy vellums, they
Disappeared in our hands.  Inklings of tide-
Pool and driftwood.

                               My blood was a river that ran
Its course.  Members feeding your deltas and birds
Breeding where the water-russet sheds on pampas
And inverness.  Eyes like wing through ever—
Green, empties the fossil shell.  Fire, brimming
Mountaintops that were, for countless millennia,
Sleeping.  Did I mention that the earth moved?
No?  Her displacement was involuntary.

Then came the waterfalls, lifting throughout
Time.  The scent, searching for its identity,
The wave, calling to its own name— Ocean,
O— cean.  And flowers, opening like galaxies
In the after-light.  A universe of face and hand
With hunger for salt-rain and then the cloud
Burst-blue and spilt and spun more redolent,
Deities, in joyous creation.

I breathe, in your ocean, like a child unborn.

.
Rose of your ear,
Lantern in your eyes,
Forest of branching hair,
In Inverness of your midlands,
I shall broach lit vernal deltas,
Kiss deep into darkling depths,
Climb the leaved trunks of thigh,
Drunk in the moisted, muted sighs
Of promise, tendered to surrender,
I shall know your ripened *******,
As bloom of moon paints moons
At night, I will be ****** in milk—
That offers itself to leeching babe,
With little, lithe fingers you rake one,
A wan vagabond, *****, homeward,
I shall know your flowing wetness,
Below my desert, with purpose,
I am lost, in sleep and dream,
May I never wake, may I
Sleep, never, may eye
Always open, keep
In tableaus of oil,
Strokes, hues,
Glittering
Of you.

I was with the ocean last night and your body
Was its vessel, overflowing.  Words were frail,
Drops indwelling about the shapeless sky,
Water reaching for its own height and breath,
Like touch, were as desperate letters exchanged,
Endlessly read, until like loamy vellums, they
Disappeared in our hands.  Inklings of tide-
Pool and driftwood.

                               My blood was a river that ran
Its course.  Members feeding your deltas and birds
Breeding where the water-russet sheds on pampas
And inverness.  Eyes like wing through ever—
Green, empties the fossil shell.  Fire, brimming
Mountaintops that were, for countless millennia,
Sleeping.  Did I mention that the earth moved?
No?  Her displacement was involuntary.

Then came the waterfalls, lifting throughout
Time.  The scent, searching for its identity,
The wave, calling to its own name— Ocean,
O— cean.  And flowers, opening like galaxies
In the after-light.  A universe of face and hand
With hunger for salt-rain and then the cloud
Burst-blue and spilt and spun more redolent,
Deities, in joyous creation.

I breathe, in your ocean, like a child unborn.