Rivers

I set out from the Port of Acapulco on the twenty-third of March
And kept a steady course until Saturday, the fourth of April, when
A half hour before dawn, we saw by the light of the moon
That a ship had come alongside
With sails and a bow that seemed to be of silver.
Our helmsman cried out to them to stand off
But no one answered, as though they were all asleep.
Again we called out: “WHERE DID THEIR SHIP COME FROM?”
And they said: Peru!
After which we heard trumpets, and muskets firing,

We liked to stick it in a bb gun and shoot it.
We tattooed with it. We said hallelujah,
the poor man’ s tanning lotion.
Then the frack wells began, something black
capping the water and we got high
watching a green-backed heron die.
We got funny at Clarion, flung
each other’ s underwear into the trees.
Why was it we got naked there
and nowhere else? Maybe we knew
we were getting good and ugly, rusted inside
as the trucks we rode into the water.
Maybe we knew we only appeared

A range of clouds banked up behind the peak
Of that apocryphal
Blue mountain, with a wide, oblique
Burst of late sun
Projecting at the east’ s receding wall

A film of what the day so far has done:
A wind that tries to scrape
The breaking waves up as they run
Across the bay
And shatter at the foot of Fluted Cape

In tern and gannet-printed veils of spray;
And trees the wind has caught,
Which seem too self-contained to sway
When they are blown,
And only move as a pleasing afterthought.

Lulled in a nook of North West Bay,
The water swells against the sand,
Hardly more liquid than Venetian glass,
In which clear surface, just a little way
From shore, some four or five petite yachts pass
With languid ease, apparently unmanned,
Adrift along the day,

Whatever the cost I pay up at the minnow pools.
I don’ t know anything of the misery of these trapped fish,
or the failure of the marsh I’ m so hidden.

Up above is the island with its few houses facing
the ocean God walks with anyone there. I often
slosh through the low tide to a sister
unattached to causeways.

It’ s where deer mate then lead their young
by my house to fields, again up above me.

Pray for me. Like myself be lost.
An amulet under your chest, a green sign of the first
rose you ever saw, the first shore.

“Painting a wave requires no system,”
The painter said, painting a wave.
“Systems may get you flotsam and jetsam,
Seaweed and so forth. But never a wave.”

There was a scroll or fine-lined curve
On the canvas first, and then what looked
Like hair flying or grayish nerves,
Which began to move as the painter worked.

“Painting the sea is a lot of trouble;
It never stops still for a moment, so
I try to make it internal, mental,
As though I stopped it, then let it go.”

Some bloodied sea-bird’ s hovering decay
Assails us where we lie, and lie
To make that symbol go away,
To mock the true north of the eye.
But lie to me, lie next to me;
The world is an infirmity.

Too much of sun’ s been said, too much
Of sea, and of the lover’ s touch,
Whole volumes that old men debauch.
But we, at the sea’ s edge curled,
Hurl back their bloody world.
Lie to me, like next to me,

Pushed prow southerly into the golden wind:

hurt the eyes: gold pelted water: so looked less far away:

plovers huddling on the tide's last piece of shore:

Rise up in brightness: clap wings::

I told myself I'll go where eagles go: if to brimstone:

my wake a narrow river back

to its source in cedar: and when sunlight embers

the shore's soft fleece will be before me.

& sea swell, hiss ofincomprehensible flat: distance: blue long-fingered ocean and its
nothing else: nothing in the above visible except
water: water and

You have a beautiful mouth,
Luigi, the man-boy says.

The rubber raft
has floated far
from shore.

The choice
is this:

medusa sea,

a boil
of   jellied lashes,

or

face
the kiss.