The ocean bathed in animal and air
became a wall against the fish.
They lipped hungrily at the sky
and spun themselves into one
motile thicket. Beneath a window of ice
a broken clock filled with the Pacific.
If I should rummage under hours
will I discover that I was always
an imperfect mystery of flesh
and wishing. Do I own the undertows
of my pelt: the soft bridge for blood
and imagination where the notes are waiting
for a dark current of hand to etch letters
into the sound of orange fog:
the ghost of a shoal that spilled
through San Francisco before we named it:
the threading of forest into a new affable creature,
where I pulled off my exosphere of skull,
where the crabs scavenged my vestigial limbs,
and inside a drop of sweat I will vent
a numinous fever. The city corals and drafts –
as handsome as a man second guessing.