The beach is made of glass
Walking backwards
On the far side of the rain
Footprints erase themselves
In swiftly drawn tongues lapping
I am inside my Melchizedek
A message, overlong
Stained with salt, curled within
Break to find the ocean’s scrawl
–Almost indecipherable
We chastise to the whine and palsied shake of aeroplanes
Bright and corkscrew shards
Just a casual threat
In the thought of sudden falling
Now a sun-struck chisel mark
In the poise of distance
Almost gone
I must, have painted the sky
Or if not me, someone else
In daubs of black, and moving lines
With that sidelong perspective
That goes
from a starred point, to almost forever
Travelled a thousand miles
(Because almost nothing poetic can be heard
in the brute and wearying sound
of hard kilometres
– except
that too savage tintinnabulation)
Only to find
The ground is more difficult here
Than all previous history’s
Inflorescences, gradually pressed
To the sandstone of
Inexplicable striations
Life is a coincidence
Like the face of god you thought you saw
In a snail shell’s jagged lines
Gone with a second glance
And, perhaps, not really there at all