I.
A sadness happened in the middle of the ocean

And I came to be

of fish bones,

shell,

glass.

at the bottom of things,
I made a home in love

and it was huge, like a sad galleon.
If I dive from the prow,

I will see you,

Centered among the seaweed

Shaped like the sun?



II.
Why do I feel safe in parentheses?
(As if sadness were a place in the body.

That is something to think about.
I had always feared that wound on Jesus’s side.

Water had come out of it.)



III.
(The enemies are not on the borders, love.

They are within.)
I remember a story of a Japanese soldier

Who lived thirty years on an island off our coast.

He didn’t realize the war was over,

And stole manioc and the smooth heads of coconuts

while brandishing his rusty sword at puzzled onlookers.
Some dreams are best not to wake up from.



IV.
There are many things we say in a singsong voice.

Up, down, briskly, quickly, over hot coals,

Running away from the sound of it.
Who is faster, you or sound?
Hear the rumbling of the thunder before the shock.

But the shock lasts.



V.
That night, I made a metaphor out of you.

I remembered you sprawled like a star.
And if you were not beautiful even then:

Hair limp along with the rest of you,

Heavy and damp with sleep,

Pillows have risen like the Great Wall of China

Between us, as we twitched,

You became beautiful in the blurry soft down of my memory.

(Things fall softly there)

So, you fell softly there, sprawled like a star.
I should’ve listened to Kundera. Now you are dangerous.

All five points of you sharp now,

Rolling in the growing space of my desire.

You, growing like a lump in my throat, block all sound,

shaped like a star.
(The enemies are within)



VI.
You woke up and raised yourself on your elbows.

And found me sleeping on the other side

And you wondered, “Who built the wall?”
I woke up and found your body pressed

Against the wall, I whispered, “Did you do this?”



VII.
She and I danced on the streets,

Dancing to anything that came on.
She danced the way she stuttered when she was nervous,

Hands in front of her, gesturing forward and forward again

As if she had something important to say.

She didn’t have to say anything.
We danced close, my face near her nape.

I laughed and backed away because her friends were watching.
Funny, we always had to think about that.



VIII.
Why does water always come?
When God parted the Red Sea, he saved many,

And when the water fell back,

He killed just as many.
And what about The Flood?
Show me the passage in the Bible that says we are condemned.
(It is here. I can’t seem to find it right now.)



IX.
‘We are tied to the ocean,’ said President John F. Kennedy during a speech at Rhode

Island in 1962, ‘and when we go back to sea, we are going back from whence we came.’

He might have meant the human race; he might have meant his family. From “Why

Kennedy Crashed” by Ed Vulliamy
Water and angels do not mix. 
They found his body a hundred feet down

Under the fuselage, hers, too.

Her arms were suspended in front of her

As if in the middle of a dance.
Were is a word that floats on water.



X.
Every day, I come here to the fifteenth-floor

To look at the ocean and see how walls can grow,

rock after huge rock, dividing sea from sea.