I have clean earth in my hands
You shake, a sea of trees
Humpty-dumpty falling
I am drunk on nectarines
Face half bellyache green
The obverse
The deep maroon
Of summer’s lost eclipse
Clouds thin as desperation
Where we once bent like ships
Buoyant but
Never quite losing
A carefully layered union
There is almost nothing
Left up here but sky
And your warm-honeyed faced
Swollen-cheeked
Jack-knife crooked
Strung on the limb
Turn aside
Far away
Water breaks, rejoins
Curves like swans, dissolving
The heat is a churl
The unctuousness
Of sickly pine
Arm in arm we go inside
Laugh-collapse
On the ricochet linoleum
We slow, walking into water
Lapping salt, uncertain how to speak
Arched words, in the face
Of an amniotic resistance
To advancing life
Remember how the Madonna grieved
When her child rose again
Counting days like seagulls
Above a garbage shore
On your holiday towel the stains
Of eggs and leavened bread
Sister what’s-your-name
Can you spare a coin for love?
You have a gravid face
Breaking open sunshine
Just a quiet deception
Something fragrant in your mouth
Crushed sweet seeds, a flower
An azure sea, a breeze below
The moon when summer
Turns, more or less, as the hand
Before your smile
Bent as it repudiates
God does not write home
With platitudes and dreads
Homilies about these dismal
Seaside coloured days
Sandwiches quite stale
How the scavengers are blessed
When they steal and beg
Other frail beatitudes from your disregard
The deck chairs bellows semaphores
In candy-coloured cyphers
A breath as light as new-made saints
On convalescent afternoons
