I spend a lot of time travelling, sleeping alone.
The temptations would have me slip terrace by terrace,
all the way to the beach, but I don’t listen,
I don’t listen to the narrow-throated blowhole
whooping it up out of limestone, the sea a refuge
of brutality and waste: where we escape
they alter the coastline: shipping sand dunes
’cross town, widening profile. Where we walk,
where waves co-sine and hemisphere the beach,
wet and dry co-exist—we’re not between a rock
and a hard place, and wherever I slip, you follow
or I follow you. Fishes flip at the river mouth,
which rarely breaks through, though when it did last year
indigenous people came from a long way to witness
the flow. The sea rose like a bubble then spread.
At night, here by the mountain, the sea is residuum.
It brings the violent and the calm out of people.
The clash is the tossing and turning we wake from.