1
The clouds that lie in cinnabar striations
are juggled by a nimble waterspout
too distant for significance. The dim
pink of daybreak binds the sky with dark
barely distinguishable from a darker sea.
The horizon mortices itself with chinks of rose.
What we call day is nothing more
than disintegrated darkness at the Straits.
Night bickers for asylum still
in unlaced shoes, implores the paling windowpanes
to be steadfast for dark against the light.
I am witness to the spectral provocations
daylight introduces to a vista
that all night stood
islanded by nothing but the stars.
2
Tired of the meditations on futility
that now retard my nights I walked to see
the waters of the Straits in darkness hesitate,
recoil and hover, tremble just before they calibrate
shocked sandstone, the staved cliff, the pitiable
barricades we raise against the terrible
erosions waves exact. The wind’s a whittler here,
pares quartz to thinnest splinters, loves the sheer
spare sea-lathed skeletons of objects cast ashore.
It comforts me at night, a watchman of the stars
that only change by reasonable laws, to parse
the luminous degradations of the dark
as lethal light insinuates and tinges. Dogs bark
down at Rice Point, a rooster clears its throat outside.
From the cliff a cormorant topples like a suicide.
3
In the watches of the night, as the Psalmist said,
I meditate on darkness, I remember my dead.
The dark is palpable, has a silken-sash-drawn feel,
gloves the troubled fingertips with a cochineal
comfort, the way spring water laves the skin
with its brisk plush touch. I will gather in
my hours as the darkness climbs and spreads.
It has become the ocean. Up to our heads
we bob and drift, remembranceless,
and for all we cling to spars of nothingness,
names burn their starlight on dark irises.
I feel the soul inside me, dear dieresis
that thews my breath and flesh, that separates
heart’s thrusting muscle as it meditates
from all the rough heart cherishes, I sense
the supple disjunctions of the animal
threshed in the indiscernible
meshes of the element and, terrified,
crow with the cock and bark with the farmer’s dog,
wriggle awake, crawl from the salt bog
of sleep unsatisfied:
on my lips and on my eyelids as the new
sun shoulders the clouds aside,
a darkness sits, intangible as dew.
