It's no longer the coast of Italy. So long;
to another world, when seen from the water all oceans and vines
in reverie, lightly frosted by hours over years
of hot showerheads and skin sleeping in airs, and your long hair.
Fissures of lightning love heat had for one, the simple comfort of water on
your neuter body, shaky hands. Whose olive beams
sunblend through globules hanging off of your finger-hairs
and glow, you glow like a village, an experiment in populous color.
And arcology and arcades tumble 'round the bay—bugs bray—
aqueducts spill their sugarwater into saltwater
and grapeleaves trining round a corridor to
a field of crowded green, like the blurred day
before one first wears new glasses. What a scene! Had we all known
our favorite colors you'd have said green of a shower that morning.
Green as a sun sparking off sweet Mary's grass. A clarity in the trees.
And if I hear you coughing then I back away
from the ceramic tub, into the hallway with its faded red rug
and flower-wilting, ornamental as all collected goods and services snug in this kitenest
and looking back through the swung door.
The tiles stained the lightest pink and white stand vagrant
and a puzzle to be solved. So many pale tiles two set horizontal,
two and two and two turned pale. And in mornings these no longer are window-tiles
only stones of the Theater Royal, repurposed. An aled Amalfi coast revolved by
a young Dane—it would have had mountains, horizons,
but here in this company staged for your viewing
every morning of early days, pre-transition, the heat ruins,
the tile of sky-sea, their meeting, that would have clammed between
pillar and castle is instead a field of bright gray. A crouching sailboat,
a shadow of a thumbnail, rests like a fly on the empty space.
There on that dot with you, I'm a fool, cutting my clothes into sails.
So we cut down on love-yous. The sea, in this case,
if not a pause, is to say of us too much. So we need a new vase.
And we leave places, and again till nothing to leave. Then there, then there,
under solar panels I'd sleep. On the deck sacrificial1—a home that be travel—the skiff! so we
can go and take our tangled roots and bodies overseas:
(And be something sweet, huddling in the cold
on the dark seas, at night, when the shower is turned off,
and the disorders ordered and the thoughts are all warm stock.
So when friends send us letters, to a box on the coast
we deftly intercept them, sailing by soapstuff.
And when you die first, tell me where the sun has gone.
Why the light's on the pier when the ceiling/sky's still soft,
where we should have come ashore, when instead we stayed aloft.
In the art, we grip booms, with our pup to-be-a-dog.
