Beside the empty half of my bed,
a little upended boat is a place for a shrine to
Our Lady of Sorrows,
the shelves festooned with glass beads
and Mexican felt-flower lights,
cradling gaudy candlesticks
and a plaster statue of Herself
with her soft, pink heart exposed.
Sweet Star of the Sea, they call her sometimes-
and there she is
in the upended dinghy
with cracks between its boards.

Sweet Mother, Sweet Maid-
you, yourself, would have changed course
long before drifting into
these stormy latitudes...

My own soft, pink flesh exposed,
I am no star, no salt-sprayed virgin,
and I fear that snake curled lovingly beneath my feet
might have born a svelte caress
and not so much the determined crush
of the theist's tender foot.

Away I sail each night
on a swell of mortality-
my poor, exposed and pink and pulsing heart
is no plaster one, I fear!

Away I rock,
through the still and lonely hours-
the dreamless hours forbid me sleep...
Those great, long curtains, Orthodox blue,
impart a sense of oceanic sky.
I drift and rock
on lust's rhythmic gloss,
the taint of sea and salt
licking at the dark-
I rock and rock and there is scant relief:
a silhouette of land, perhaps,
a night-gull's abandoned cry.

Adrift on a tide of veniality,
the night is a vast and lifting sea,
the stars so far above,
but they curve around my boat
to cradle me.

Adrift!
The waft of salt and weed
stamped on my skin,
I ache all day, all night.
This is no sparkling lust
made of dappled light,
of evanescent air-
this lust is the raw scrape of the oars in their locks,
the creak of timbers,
the stink of the tide in the boards.

This sea-laden vessel of desire
is the pong of the thick, gelatinous blood
released from the flathead's gills;
this lust is the rot of sea-lettuce
seared and cooked by the sun-
a papery carpet discarded on the distant shore.

This lust puts grit between your teeth,
puts salt to burn the pink rim
around your sea-stained eyes;
it washes a type of mad and glass-blue light
into your landward squint...

The silence of the lonely hours,
thick as wadding.
Once, the kapok mattresses were washed away,
when ships were wrecked-
a century later, the seeds from amidst the fluff
have germinated trees
on distant, isolated shores.