Third Shore (Feb. 15, 2005)

Daily I walk this shore
of what cannot be yet is
amazed at all the blue
it takes to name the
silent depths of you. Some
days I recall the way I
walked that shore alone
and utterly washed by
your wet lips; other times
I think of how you stood
just so before the sea
in singular ecstasy
of my heart’s bigger,
albeit wetter half,
the half I graze and
altar yet dare not
fully breathe.
No two walks are
alike, though the
peramble is the same:
my butt here motionless
upon this writing chair
as the iambs trod down
and back, line by line
on down a page
not wide but oh
so deep, dowsing
til your salt rhetoric
has soused the daily
ache, a singing
man doused in brine
til every bone, every
writhe bereft of fin
is blue and wild
and fine, whatever
ends I started with
now bottomless, like
a descending magnum
of old wine. I walk on
down to where that
distant reach where
staid fixities greet
& mortar dripping walls,
ambiguities of wing
and wind, sea and land,
my hips to yours
exchanging fruit
we’ll never fully ripen
nor squeeze to
dregs of rind. And
there -- at that locus
of my walk which
has now grown
fully here -- there
yet here we meet again,
me a motion
of wavelike words
and you uncorsetted
of all but verbs, our
wash more pure
than ink or ichoring
balls -- a spiral
springlike spume
of spermacetti fire.
Between the worlds
we greet and kiss,
two-thirds strange
and one salt bliss,
irreconciled and
inconsolable and
worth each spilling
acre of these pages
in wild and worse abyss.
There and here in
this third world
which is both shore
and poem abed,
we sing in salutation
of the diurnally
sweet dead, those
lovers who didn’t
know they’d found
each other til the
tide had fully ebbed,
leaving tide pools
and tropes of love
to fade and bleach
and lathe this third
world’s loam of
blue-in-white sands.