... and I look
for a comparison inside myself:
perhaps it is a grocery store surrounded by the sea
and torn clothing from which sea water is dripping.
--Pablo Neruda

I see the defeated owners
of our inner beach houses -
their last walls falling into the sea.
The long waves sweep over
so many decades, so many
efforts to
hold it all back.

I see the huge, pitiless ocean gods,
inside us,
daemons who have created
and destroyed so much,
but now stand with hands in the air,
gesturing incoherently,
unable to speak,
miserable about
what they have done.

I see blind nurses in the hospitals
of the sea,
searching all night for a bandage,
praying in their own odd languages,
hoping to feel some clue,
some way toward
the source.

People turn away from
the submerged car wrecks
where someone they love
still cries out.

How many defeats, evasions,
Inchoate signals:
Earthquakes inside a child’s neck,
Stomachs that twist and squeeze
like octopus tentacles
and breathing, heavy and inconsolable
that can only be continued,
and then finally and terribly,
tormented confusions
looking for a shape, as if a hand,
heated in the fire,
wanted
to be hammered on the anvil.

Awaiting these ravages, I am at home in my store
surrounded by the sea,
Figures pull themselves
from the windswept ocean,
dragging whatever debris
they could cling to.

I take their clothes
and with some
small ceremony
hang them on the everpresent,
unnoticed wash line of the horizon.