The curtains belly in the waking room.
Sails are round with holding, horned at top,
and net a blue bull in the wind: the day.
They drag the blunt hulls of my heels awake
and outrigged by myself through morning seas.
If I do land, let breakfast harbor me.
Waking in June, I found a first fruit
riding out the water on a broken branch.
Sleep was a windfall, and its floating seeds
steered me among the Cyclades of noise.
A coastal woman with a cricket in her hair
took soundings as the time chirped in her head:
I knew that night-time is an Island District;
curtains are my sails to shore.
Block and tackle string a butcher’s dance
and hoist the sun on home: the bull
is beached and hung to dry, and through
his bloody noon, the island of his flank
quakes in the silence and disturbs the flies.
Flesh has crawled out on the beach of morning,
salt-eyed, with the ocean wild in hair,
and landed, land-locked, beached on day,
must hitch its hand to traces and resist
the fierce domestic horses teamed to it.
Drivers and driven both, the plowing heels
bloody the furrows after plunging beasts:
the spring of day is fleshed for winter fruit.
Fallen in salt-sweat, piercing skin, the bones
essay plantation in their dirt of home
and rest their aching portion in the heat’s
blood afternoon. O if the sun’s day-laborer
records inheritable yield, the script
is morning’s alpha to omega after dark:
the figured head to scrotum of the bull.
Accountancy at sundown is the wine of night:
walking the shore, I am refreshed by it
and price the windrise and the bellowing surf
while, waiting for its freight of oil and hides,
a first sail starts the wind by snapping whips.
Leave a Reply