nisyros


The room is under the sea.
In the shuttered dark
in the dark beyond the shutters
the waves surge in our ears,
break on our brains. All night
boom down long caves, through
old fissures honed to aching;
wash the loose shale from recent slips,
flood rough hollows where pigs lie low,
the alcoves set with icons, grottoes
where spirits hold out pallid hands;
over a lifetime's etchings
of our unreasoned algebras,
all night.
No sense of fish or bump of flotsam,
only the dense fact of water
so totally present it cannot be felt -
the surf falling over and over over our heads
with a roar resounding in the deep currents
of dreams as dark as shapeless
as the pulsing mass they move in

In the morning to wake worn,
eyes vacant as beached fish,
as gouged pits in the cliff.
To open the shutters, watch the swell
whacking the wall
all the bones
of my skull are coral, a delicate net,
mindless, brittle in the wind's grip,
drained, scoured out, stranded.