On the cusp of a dune in the middle of dunes in the middle of the sea.
A hand turns the page, the ocean overturns the land.
The land picks up & moves grain by grain across the highway.
And you & I who have traveled           are here in a swirl of compass grass.
One ridge after another floats into the binocular lens until we reach the edge beyond which
there is only blue: sky-fused waves, sea serpents           foaming & half crazy.
We surely are lost, but down           is still down: fishing boats end up there, waterlogged & mythic.
The Lucy G. sank tied up at the pier and lay there patrolled by squid, embossed with barnacles, seaweed tugging at her rigging in the tide.
You could look           straight down on her decks & derricks, not so tidy now.
Look up: a heady diaphanous robe. Dusk settling, sun giving way to languor,           your warm brown thigh. A person
could touch—here—wipe the freckling sand from its curve. From the cleft between
a throaty motor starts up, whines and lifts into the air: ultralight climbing a steep hill                     east or south or west, light blurring into indigo.
Two figures           you & I dozing, backs to a biting wind, doused in dusklight
wondering if and when the coyotes will emerge           from their beech forest dens
wondering about safe haven, safe landing, what else will shake itself from sand
          to rise up, circling.

Darkness overwhelms me just before sleep like a wave, the headlong rush of long-distance buses
passing through Belfast, New Russia, and Pauling, pausing briefly in truck-stops where arc lights
transform into columbine. See the now-yellow buses slide
down ramps of enormous cactus flowers, and when I awake I find
I am headed due south into the gardenias of my childhood.
The fragrance could marry me forever or were I able to endure the intensity of night-blooming jasmine
I would weep at last into its branches, drunk and allergic at the same time.
      ~   ~   ~
Each journey unfolds like a come-on, the way palms strung with white lights
pull the shoppers deeper into the mall. Possibilities expand
then the realization comes that we may never find our way home, and we stand
waving goodbye on the deck of a luxury liner heading out to sea at night.
      ~   ~   ~
Already I have gone far from where I began. The child crawls from its dozing mother;
the hand, blindly exploring, wanders from the body until some precious
object is grasped, and I stir as if trying to rouse myself,
pulling at the heavy legs and arms like oars. In the distance, the lights of shore are winking
while next to me in water the old familiar faces waver like glimpses of the unborn.
      ~   ~   ~
What can I do with this wildering ache rising to the surface after years of drowning
or the sea yielding up its fishbone and coral in a world that is perpetually transforming?
How can I stop you and shake you and say to you now
Listen, what happened and when and why?
      ~   ~   ~
Time oozes from its wrapper like chocolate on a window sill.
Look, taste it, it is done. The world has changed into something no one
could predict or recognize even were I able to put a name to it, or name myself
having changed so much and being so much a part of it.

I took a carrot with two long roots, rounded, even sumptuous if you looked close up, tapering into slender legs. It had a tight pert butt, nice crease where the cheeks met top of the thighs, then a stomach topped short by a bush of stiff brown hair. I was ready with the paring knife to saw that fetch in half, stared at the abdomen and stopped, put the idea back back in the fridge and dreamed of dying, dreamed of creamed corn and having another ear, heard the abruptly silenced shriek of who knows what from the wood, saw those yellow eyes take a bead on me. And then I knew there was no way out, the body is served up at the dinner table, so the next night I took a butcher's knife and prayed, freed an orange foot from its orange ankle, ankle from calf, calf from knee, knee from thigh, came up short where the torso met the leg, closed my eyes and in one firm stroke parted the lower stomach from the crotch, which I pitched to the waiting she-bitch on the floor who swallowed it whole, unblinking, and wanted more.