pacific

[i]

Right here

I held your hand and you were

Undecided—held my cold fingers

(as the sky was still dark and my heart

still sore)

and touched it to the sand.

I kissed it later, the sea hadn't washed it

Yet.

(And you weren't looking.)

[ii]

I held my hand to this grey (shiftless, undine) sky, which reflects

this

Grey sea,

this grey sand,

and your eyes.

(hesitant with want and doubt and something Moroccan in texture)

what happened to the sickly-sniffed nights of Fall, where these waters were put away

for summer?

Then your eyes weren't so ambivalent with

Mine.

Under the first clutch of winter,

These waters did not freeze.

And I can still pretend it wasn't the sun-still-under-water that made you smile.

[iii]

It is quite another thing to drown in crisp sting of salt water.

In here I am held and

Holding.

[iv]

Sometimes I feel that I would like to jump and

Take you with me.

And it is when I am looking this way—

Touching with my eyes and the ocean as my

Backdrop—

I wish you would stop pulling

Back.

[v]

He asks me if coral is a color,

And I tell him to imagine love at sixteen.

[vi]

Here I am!

The gulls have flown-scattered-jumped-away (kicked up in a cloud of sand in

Disruption of the million sanctities of a

Morning on the beach)

And there's nothing left but me—soft and smiling.

Soft and screaming and yours to hold, except you're still staring

At these scattered birds…

And I don't know if I'm still waiting.

[vii]

Though you will walk along, the ocean lapping at your unclothed feet, I do not think that I will follow (even if you say the water's good for you, darling)

Because

I've followed far too long and this

Girl needs to rest from running circles (pentagons and dizzy spirals of

Black holes)

And sometimes wonders if watching you is

All she'll ever do.

A crab

pinched her leg and it wasn't

Half as hard as heartbreak.