Myself—be Noon to Him

He left

my plight

wild and still

as lyric. Moths

in the sea

plume. A freak

of lightning,

no storm. The tides’

argument:

to evade

the shore,

or crest.

If impatience. If

orbital motion.

Master it.

—

So? So? the sea asks.

I envy the one-word lexicon,

the sea’s singular mastery.

So!—to declare certitude.

So?—to not care.

And so much to not care about!

Description, namely,

every word testing

what’s real

only to fail.

Today I feel sad.

But somehow

this is wrong.

Gulls disappear

into the palest sky.

I feel quiet.

I am not quite myself today.

Gray wings and gray clouds.

Godwit birds outrun the tide.

Today I am a fragment of shell

thinking of him. So?

Yellow beach grass struck by surf.

—

Meaning is the wing

but I did not mean

so much as meander.

The black hurt

gnawing at.

The black hurt he deemed shame.

And where should I go

now that I’ve reached the sea?

—

I was thinking about a time

before war,

when the sea was not a border

and we dove

into the punishing

waves. Some shore-noises

I forget: the hour shifting

with the tide-turn

like an octave drop, sand-scatter

against our bodies, phantom cries

from phantom children.

I want to write a poem with nothing in it.

No more birds tracing the coast,

no anxious clock, no lists of loss, no song

other than . . . Midday

amnesty. Fragment

of sun. I think

this is not the same beach.

Too thin a shoreline,

too close to town.