Some mornings, the hem of the forewash had been almost
golden, alaskas and berings of foam
pulled along the tensile casing.
Often the surface was a ship’s grey,
a destroyer’s, flecks of sun, jellies,
sea stars, blood stars, men and women of war,
weed Venus hair. A month a year,
for thirty years. Nine hundred mornings,
sometimes we could tell, from the beach,
while taking our clothes off, how cold the water
was, by looking at it – and then,
at its icy touch, the nipples took
their barnacle glitter, underwater
a soft frigor bathed the sex as if
drawing her detailed outline in the seeing
brain, and he braced his knees in the press
of the swell, and I dove under, and near the
floor of this life I glided between his ankles, not
knowing, until he was behind me, if I had got
through without brushing them. Then,
the getting out, rising, half-poached
egg coming up out of its shell and membrane,
weight of the breasts finding their float-point
on the air, soppy earths, all this
in the then beloved’s gaze,
the ball in the socket at the top of his thighbone
like a marrow eye through which the foreshore could have
seen us, his hip joints like the gravital centres
of my spirit. Then we’d lie, feet toward the Atlantic,
my hypothermic claw tucked
beneath the heat of his flank, under
day moon, or coming storm,
swallow, heron, prism-bow, drizzle,
osprey, test-pilot out to No Man’s.
And then, before our sight, the half world
folded on itself, and bent, and swallowed,
and opened, again, its wet, long
mouths, and drank itself.