Atlantic

You,
your scent a dark medicine
that climbs the nostrils
like ambition, or molasses,
in dreams of conquerors English, Spanish:
the illicit pie cooling on a castle sill.
 
Menthol to mop up maternal confusion,
balm for abandoning breasts, eyes, ears—
the boat tears away from the infant, 
squalling and shitting onshore— 
  
Puffin’s grief, 
Inebriate hopscotch child, 
  
You, 
who slurp the seed of sailors 
like condensed milk, and spit back, 
to a crew of innumerable widows, 
a flock of black armbands— 
  
You, who fill up with trash, 
flotillas of plastic 
the size of Lesotho— 
  
It’s Your salt made the sweat 
in the crease of the chimneysweep’s neck, 
a glue for the disparate flesh 
of ancestors. 
  
Constellation in a closed lid, 
lonely gramophone, shaving the desert 
with your persistent, annihilating song— 
Soon you’ll be mine again. 
  
You, whom the cold hands of gods punched 
in righteous indignation out of the earth— 
  
Wet cousin of doubt 
from whence boats fly. 
 
 


‘Atlantic’ appeared in
Central Avenue issue #26, January 2005