A ship sits on the sea raking
the water for fishes. A wave
flops heavily on top
of itself, defeat, and before
long does it again, defeat.
A skate, a baby, newly beached,
lies on the sand working her
sucking holes. Last night
I woke to a singing so high
it used only a soprano’s
last outer notes, sometimes
sliding up into ultra-alts—
music a whale straying
into the Aegean long ago
might have keened through the wood walls
of ships in the black hours,
luring, wrecking
the sailors. I followed
down dark corridors to a lighted
courtyard where a woman sat
up to her waist in a pool,
singing. She turned
and kept singing, as though
she saw someone through me
and sang to him. Her breasts
were small and shapely,
like an athlete’s, their
nipples never darkened
of babies. On the blurred
flesh under water black
dulse stirred—and down there too
was a sparkling, as of scales,
as if the submerged half of her
might be shutting itself up now
inside a fish tail—or, it could be,
pipping, busting, uncrumpling
a forked creature. On the beach,
pebbles, or maybe scales
shed on this spot at high tide
in some throe of metamorphosis,
gleam. In the skate
the mass of whatever
substance flesh on dying becomes
presses down into the sand,
trying to fall into the heaven
inside earth almost visible
through the half-washed windows
of stones. The sea
bristles up in waves. The largest
strikes the shore, gets upended,
leaps, lunges, crawls
all the way up to the skate,
then half sinking straight down,
half flowing back out, drags off
the carcass, leaving bubbles,
which pop, leaving the force
that crushes waves into nothing
to its victory. As when
mom harangues and pop icy-shoulders
the boy who can’t think, can’t yell,
explain himself, laugh, love, or sing;
can only fall in loneliness
with … but … who,
on earth?