Maybe enough light    •    to score a wave    •    reflecting moonlight, sand    •    reflecting
moonlight and you    •    spotting from shore    •    what you see only    •    as silhouette
against detonating bands    •    of blue-white effervescence    •    when the crown of the
falling    •    swell explodes upward    •    as the underwave blows through it    •    a flash
of visibility quickly    •    snuffed by night    •    the surf fizzling and churning    •
remitting itself to darkness    •    with a violent stertor    •    in competition with no other
sounds

I finger this vagabond cloth to numbness.
I can't even capture your hands
or what carries us limb by limb.

1. After years away I was back in London visiting a friend who lived in Kensington in one of those cheap council flats that  in my day poor people like me fought for. He had a few people  in; some I knew; some I didn’t. They sidled between the furniture and the stacked books. A bitter smell came from marigolds in a vase.

Smoking a cigarette in a classroom
a woman is copying sentences from
a book called Our American Way of Life

Are you listening? Mommy takes care of you.
She’s writing this letter with her pen dipped
in the milk her nipples won’t stop streaming

I have come often to this forest,
home to these never not green trees.
Now, in a grove of auburn bones

I watch like a praying mantis 
In the dawn of the day of the world, 
My fingers are knotted like bamboo-shoots, 

Take back that look. Close the door 
To that shuttered room. 
The thought of what we left, forget. 

Go lift that pane of moonlight from the floor
And tell Nicotiana to stop 
Screaming with her perfume. 

Give me loops.
Give me turtles.