Sunday, April 13, 2008

I-i, II-ii, III . . . M M M

Who can calculate which there is more of, water
or blood? Salt and brine, or a sanguinary course
of heat? Sky and cloud, or the oxygen blue pulse,
in-beat of a circuitous and ceaseless rondeau? Source
of poetry, moon-drawn, displaced by the falling prow of

the sky, the rolling wave of the planets, the rush, the lull,
iced and thawed in the history of numbers, seventy beats,
One-one, Two-two, Three . . . a thousand thousand thousand
shark and flesh infested Oceanias. Only a slight hint, a
scent, bare and funereal, of salt-blue, of red that breaches

the shore, the rising tide of all that is, everything in
this one instant, breathing, beating, effervescent baptism,
crumbling mountain of ash and salt, the flood that overtakes,
that sucks the air from our mouths, that liquifies the ground
beneath our feet, broken shells, endless undertow, spume.