ust four letters in a mouth,
you are a swollen word,
an impregnable word,
a dazzling swarm.
A toast to all things:
to the shape of men;
the fathomless water
of women;
to the song in the damp earth,
to the light,
the heady air;
the lotus bud; the grape; the
pitch of a soft note; to the memory
of green days; to nights, thick
with celestial bodies
and the cries of the newly born.
You leap
from the bosom
of all joy uttered;
a smiling rogue;
a soft warrior;
an open sanctuary,
flinging your arms,
dangling your treasure,
a tribute to
the tongue that knows,
that in speaking
your name,
to give it life within the world,
we become boundless;
we inherit the infinite;
we are unheralded.
Unheralded.
Unheralded.

n a beach in Sausalito,
damp with skirts of ebb
and flow,
you etched my name with your
heart and the bounty
of the sea.
Sand dollars,
driftwood,
sea glass,
dreams,
all conspired on
a barefoot afternoon
to spell me out:
my name in the sand,
my name in the powdered earth,
you sang me free -
gave me the timeless
song of things
worn down by the undertow,
of edges
softened by the current,
of fruit rounded by the unceasing motion
of the breakers,
by the phases of
the ardent moon.

You wrote upon the world!
You wrote with
the golden stylus
of your gleaming love;
you forged with a hammer
of conviction,
the truth of things:
in the marrow of a Californian
summer,
with simple treasures,
you wrote
my name upon the world.

May the tide escort my name
to plains of sand,
seaweed thick;
may I be swept
to trenches
deep in the floor of the earth;
may I travel
to foreign shorelines;
sink to the pirate’s grave,
roll beneath the ice-caps,
bask in the filtered
light
one thousand fathoms deep;
may my grit go to the
pearl producing
bi-valves;
mingle
with the ribs
of whales,
settle in the swamps and
mangroves,
slip betwen the toes
of strolling lovers -
moonlit,
may I lay amid life
and forgotten artefact.

Your love upon the world;
I am submerged,
scattered,
smiling,
drowning,
in the ocean of your yes.

t is like this:
the ray is stable.
It holds space,
shines with perfect stasis, but that
is action. We are
the inactive ones,
we who circumnavigate;
so often forgetting our motion.

It is a whisper to a void
sans expectation,
a finger on a naked throat
trailing slowly.
The sun is always present.

It is a blade to carve a different name
where your own was fixed,
a wind to thresh your body
into oblivion;
a mirror
to marvel breathlessly
at the dessicated self.

We are the sinking.
We are the rising.
And love is action.
And love is standing still.