Yellow Sea, Galenograph 2017
THE FALL OF CLUES
I
Things that might happen: It could rain or the door you open
goes nowhere.
Things do happen. Before you know it, the pain of loss
when nothing is yet lost.
It never happens, yet it does.
Everything is hooked to a sound
remembered; the smell of wind, woven
from the loom of childhood, the heaving
beaches and blue water, distant voices
curving across yellow dunes.
You remember yourself a child soaring above the sand
and how you measured the shadow of your body
the sun made. You remember
the pale sky’s invisible moon, and one day, when you think surely
everything meets in the perfect tense, something
imagined will happen.
It happens.
And you no longer care to fly, drifting into the sea,
treading in the perfect turbulence
of God’s imperfect eye.
You deny nothing—darkness and the day of your death,
a body made in the sand. Long shadows
of late afternoon light. You stumble
on your past, then fall upon descending clues, imagining
a life you’d live again,
just as you dreamed you might.
II
I remember each word you said. I remember
the light lingering outside
the room where the bed held us.
I remember you said your beautiful legs
could be held, would lead me to intoxication,
the soft-curved inner thigh turning,
and I, mad-like and tremulous, drank the dark heat;
I made the journey again
and again, and from all that I tasted, from all that I drank,
I grew drunk on the taut-like beauty of your skin.
I remember the slow sound of your low-
throated laughter slide across the darkness
above my heart, how you held my head
close to your loins, growing and rising
to the pinnacle of desire. I felt the press and thrum
of wings slide away, and I, filled with your sea,
released of fire, surrendered to the kiss
and heaving dunes of your body,
there on the raft of sleep,
beneath the invisible moon.
