Eyes, o sand dollars!
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--
but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.
Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.
****************
this is a second draft.
