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.
