1
If you are not here, I cannot touch you.
Then what shall I do under the sun with my body?
Drowse. Sprawl face down on the glittering beach.
Fiddle sand through my fingers. But not think of you.
2
Not think. Eyes tighten on the wrinkling glare
Of water that fractures miles along the shoreline.
I think of miles. The same light does not fall
Here as falls where you are. I pour moon's
Equal silver over mind's Carolina
Where you will fall asleep. I think to breathe
In the temperate air where office, hospital, house
Rest, dream-washed by imperturbable blue.
I think to take to my body some of the patience
Buildings have at night. That cold color.
3
Only I don't. I image an abstract room.
Summer outside. Shine of a silver window.
You, asleep in white sheets. I touch them. Warm.
My fingers. Your face. Your hair bristling. And I tremble.
Ah, but it's sand in my fingers, at my cheek, harsh
Under my breasts, and sun tense at my back.
4
Kailua Beach-a shore slung around a bay,
Casually beautiful, as if it had been imagined
Easily, and in an offhand gesture
Made tangible. Before we touched each other
I came here sometimes, dreaming we might meet
And speak in the common light. But the day I saw you
I was so shaken by fright I covered my face.
5
I would not now. Love in love's substance lives.
You have become so familiar to my hands
That almost by thinking I touch you, I can touch you.
But there's only the gradual surf and the sand. And a shudder
Of running steps. My heart suddenly winces
In my ribs, strikes, as I turn to face what seems
Almost your frame, close, improbably haloed.
6
Not you. I breathe. But I think in some sense you
Are alive in me as I brush off grains of sand
Stuck to my skin. My flesh. My flesh is breath
Catching on images, thought-nicked. A salty taste.
A smell of beach and sweat. A vision of light
Brilliantly cast in cerulean water, and of islands
Offshore that darken or shine as the sun sweeps them,
Of the wave's fall and return down the curved littoral.
7
Ah, I do wish you were here with me,
So in your hands I live. But I've had enough
Of the moony Carolina fantasy makes
In the racket of truth. Sometime maybe the moon
Will scatter silver over us there. Or maybe
Not. Fact is the loveliest world there is.
Kailua Beach. The always spangled sea
And there, high up, five crank-winged frigate birds
Rapt in their flight, are coasting the fabulous azure.
8
How lively the ocean glistens, its keen salt
Stinging and flecking my arms. The water slides
Around me, heaving blue breakers ashore. I hear
The sound of their fall and the water-tingle in my ears
As I turn and dive under a swell, while my body
Rises, drifts, thinks, thinks water, blue water
Rising and falling, sun, hot glitter of air,
Salt water falling and falling, holding my body,
Bearing me safe and easy in the bay.