or the way they heap as if piled
there by a copper-skinned man
gathering his roofing in a time
now as ceased as the midden shell
rings and the rose-colored sail
of his boat.

It’s not the way a storm tide
thrashes white foam up and over
the lip formed by last year’s dredge
spew, a renourished beach, these
desiccated reeds criss-crossed
and flattened into a seamstress’s
edging suddenly spongy with salt vomit
and rain,

or the humiliating contrast
of the hotel’s pots of hyacinths
blushing in the midst of dusty miller,
and the bordered mauve kale opening
like a girl’s crinoline under the
palmettos.

The land drawing its line against a
sculpting ocean that eats into cliff,
that powders schist, hurling the
knobbed whelk out of dream,
castigating siphon-feeders and the
filtering soft-coin lives that attach
themselves to slippery stone, creating
a polis with a single, repetitive thought,