My foot on the wood

and the heat surging through it

seems a bourgeois grandeur

here in the public sauna.
A long way from the hot

bitumen of home.

I am no exile, though

I doubt I belong here
in this, or most poems.

But to be a conduit of beauty,

to be somewhere

between dirt and bird,
song surging through you –

that is a pretty wish.

Even a silent song

playing in one's veins, some-
thing approaching the throb within

Beethoven, would be okay.

The sharpening of a sense

with the perishing of another.
The salt rising to the surface

of the body reminds it

of the short distance

it has crawled from the ocean,
ancient secrets embedded

in the flesh. The body

has endured a short lesson

in how to be here.
But it changed our shapes.

It changed our song.

We did a few drawings.