Salty Grammar (Dec. 2003)

I am her berry O-mouth,
her silvering tongue,
blue grammarian
of the salt-tiding blue:
I turned and touched
her on some foreign
night, and she began
to sing, up from
the throat of my
every heaven-flung
nerve. Sing she did,
ever louder as
some woman smiled
and bid me mount
and ride wave
dazzle to the moon,
each foaming plunge
a construct of
arch and ache,
each stout article
of my faith
received in her
voweled sighs, her
Os and Ahs,
her sibilant, soft
Yes ... And so she
wrote her blue flamelets
down in the burning
book whose leaves
were torn from my
mind and heart and
balls; wrote them
down loin for line
in a wavelike sine
from one white startle
to the next, bed
to bed a voyage
like ravening, her
thirst the moon
hung high in the
window, gleaming
one white road
through all that
blackening blue.
She wrote the story
down and called
it my life, a
saltier hagiography
than I would choose
to write, but hey!
I am just the
hand in her
scriptorium,
transcribing the
next song, dipping
this pen into
her dark and then
scratching for a while.
She works out the
genitives, the syntax
and style of the
tale told so. My job
is just to chord
the mordents and
mellifluents of
her faux-angelic ire,
a vocalissimus
of beachside wonder
one poem short
of the surf's one choir.