Fasting from Speech Because of the Sea

Down a flung coast,
your voice, palm oil.

Chants wick around the house.
I am pallid, your voice,

a distillate of the forecast,
freeclimbs.

Your landing craft ferries out
again and again

every time the same
and I finger matches

diagram the wait

combine spices,
season out the ring,

pile spines which carcass
the unkempt lawn

of a year’s seasons:
a meal, your smell.

I broadcast my preoccupation,
focus my penmanship,

decrypt your air post airport epistle,
desiderata of sequences and series ravel.

You dismember
into a fraught epic
called spontaneity.

The mapped distance alchemizes
into the sopped flesh of a collapsed moment

when the microscope
is cross-haired in the telescope.

You carve echoes in the threshold,
self-replicate on the large island:

townsites for your buildings,
ornamented suburb floodplains

a whitewashed steeple.
Luminous basalt, its new glare

double knots of milled boards
in the speckled craftsman ceiling.

Beach work inside your sleep.
Polymer cotton, wind-wracked

airborne now, a geophysical handle.

A strand left to tangle
in the beach cobbles.

A spider on your arm,
pausing, pausing, walking on.