I
Now, all at once, the sea shudders grasping in
the red dawn-beams.
For the first time ever (having been a stone
billions of years),
Twitching, hunching, reaching out, a crab
gropes toward food-fishes,
Blinking its eyes, its brain. By now,
I am almost used to it,
The wet sand, and the hot sand, and the slip
up and back of the tide.
I have considered it without conclusion,
the sun like a crab,
The shifting glare of the cliffs, the cliffs shading
inward, hazing toward blue,
And the tide slipping back with me in it,
or sliding up
As I swim preceded by my claws.
II
And now,
Hushed at the edge of sleep, slushing back
like the tide
And up like the tide; now as the bat glides out
and circles,
And the owl’s note stuffs the whole wound
of the dark,
And brittle moths bulge gleaming through their eyes;
now-having pushed up
From a tree’s roots clutching stones, fibering down— a leaf,
The whispering stretched tip of my tongue, follows
the forest folds of your ear
Where ferns breathe and a termite-eaten stump
collapses softly inward,
And the swirl of your retreating hair cries: “Further! further!”
III
And now
The sea sags back; pebbles, shell-bits
seethe at me, past me;
One broken feeler is growing again,
not through my effort,
Nor because the stone I sleep beneath
has frightened me
With silence. Sometimes the cliffs
glow orange
In light reflected from my shell,
and from my claws
Sand-shadows glisten and sink when the tide slips back
With me in it, slushing shell-bits and weeds, and after a while,
Beneath my stone, hunched in, now
I will sleep.
IV
And now,
At the hushed edge of sleep in the slope shade
of the sea-tilt,
My eyes tumble back into my brain,
remembering
The stone limbering for the first time ever
now as the push upwards
Of the tree, shaking free its bats and owls,
strains into leaves,
A leaf, my tongue-in the moonlight,
in the moth-light,
In the whole space of the wound of the dark- my tongue calling
Now in the wind-swirl gleam of your retreating hair, “I love you!”
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