erosion island

1

Her hair across my chest spread intermeshed.
A wave meets a damaged shore. Never damages
the shore. I cup her ear to my ribs
as I read more lines in her crude dialect.

The ocean is the greatest acid.
Erosion is a starving contortionist
             with skin like diamonds, exercising.

My thirst is as bottomless as

a shovel cursed to levitate over soft ground

2

Forever all morning your wife beats the coffee beans with a hammer.
She intends it to strain I go insane in the yammering.
I need that hot item. The countertop suddenly cracks, and she
too, in a small way, holding a hammer in a camper in her negligee.

She slides over a chipped cup.
I am glad for any gesture in the chaos
of observing this marriage. The camping trip
is full of murderers behind every map, is full

of rage behind every simple suggestion

3

Squirrels haunt the payphones.
I try to call you from the ranger’s station,
no answer, I walk back towards the ocean
smiling in self-immolation.

I am a deer with three good legs;
I am no prow’s figurehead.
Only the blues remind me I need a woman:
Lightning Thompkins, John Lee Hooker,
Howling Wolf hunting the island

4

There are three incredibly poisonous snakes:

the hooknosed seasnake (venom 60 times more powerful than a rattlesnake)
the Russell’s viper (it has killed the most people worldwide)
the taipan (one bite can kill a mature elephant).

Man has a venom that is slow, and it only works
on his own kind. It takes years
after the first bite of the first
handshake. A beautiful blue poison we share
erodes our island everywhere.

5

The closer you get to the water,
the better the soul.

The closer to the desert
the better the mind.

The closer to the earth
the better the body.

The closer to the air
the better the words.

The closer to the celestial
(there is no such thing as being

any closer to the celestial).

6

Tried to dig the seashell out;
it was like a stubborn tortoise’s spine.
Turned out to be the tip of a treetrunk;
shoreline is treeline here.

7

Shoreline is treeline in these lines
a mind sanguine on a horizon
a constant friction of fission

my sunglasses are missing
in this world of everything under the sun
burnt skin will peel like a page from me
like the ash of a burnt wing

8

Listening to the surf, I know now
how to name knives.

9

Looking for sponges, only jellyfish mutilations
wash up as you smoke and I drink
and we wish it all to fall to us, a manna on our bare feet
like new eyebrows, like now, like tan skin, like belonging.

We would walk on nails to get to The Largest Nail in the Region
and this is tourism.

As the barbarians build their arcades and we make love to women
and their agendas, we still have an undeniable urge
to hunt down all of our best wishes, stab fishing-hooks

through their lips as each shorewhisper murmurs.
The Word hears itself and writes like it doesn’t.
I hear what does not write and mishandle silences.
I should have been on a copra plantation,
a Polynesian with my indecipherable rongo-rongo boards
making basalt carvings of this life, for

this life requires much thicker skin than mine.
We buy lawn-chairs and lotion and talk of flippant armageddons:
me, the disgruntled wife, and my best friend the husband.

10

In the Dead Sea the water is so thick
you can’t swim. Level drops three ft. a year.
Such saltiness. Exploit resources, swim here. Don’t

settle down. The loggerheads
only land long enough to lay their eggs on this island, then leave
life to its best marathons

11

DW loves RH
carved
in a picnic bench.

Any language that allows love to emerge
in a quadra-set of initials
is a language better than one

I have ever spoken
in a poem.

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