{sea-anemone}

barely inside and out, the rippling enfoldment

that adheres to your nerve-tips, that draws you

further away, abandons any comfortable reassurance
 		{sea-breeze}

through your voice, strained to breakpoint,

hastily called upon, past your lips, parched,

cracking into bloodlines, blisters ready to weep
		{sea-gull}

or swoop and dive and bank and soar

or pick scaly iridescence off your blinking eyes

or steal the thoughts leaking from your bones
		{sea-horse}

from your memories of brothers, sisters,

babes-in-arms, collected, recollected, encased

by the thinnest of ivory, the purest of gold
		{sea-pen}

across the ebb, the flood, the marks circumscribing

your day-long, week-long, drift through doldrums,

your irresolute desire to be elsewhere
		{sea-salt}

the sweatiness of countless dock-side farewells,

the story you neglected to tell the crowds that came

and went and cheered and invariably forgot to smile
		{sea-serpent}

too bright for photography, too dense for dreams,

the sun, the air, the fire ablaze underwater,

while you, alone, prepared to catch the sparks
		{sea-shore}

a fleck of paint, screw-threads, unspliced fray,

is this some kind of clue? splinters, half-varnished oak,

was this your final hand-hold?
		{sea-snail}

perhaps you wished for oxygen, a raft, a tightly closed

bulkhead, instructions on which way to come about

in case of break or catastrophic failure below deck
		{sea-star}

what did you see, scratching for contact, before

the sky was crushed flat on its back, before

coral reefs zigged and zagged and slashed at the rain?
		{sea-wasp}

useless now, the oil-skins, Mae-Westers, personal

flotation devices as required under law, a buoy

engulfed with tendrils displaced in the roil
		{sea-weed}

only By-the-Wind-Sailors, storm-sintered glass,

one canvas shoe, barnacles, slow-darkening Sargasso,

the bells, a message unbottled, awaiting receipt