This Strange Island

1.
Time reaches out as a cliff with treacherous claws,
taunting the sea that batters itself to pieces
like love
on the jagged reefs of
brutality,
ignorance,
misunderstanding.
Such is a critic's apt description
for this deluge of an ocean's clamor
that's cracked open all my levees.

2.
Morning, that beast, sucks me out in a place
now here,
now there
like the sun at its setting.

I fall somewhere in the in-between:
now half-way from self-contempt,
now half-way from God,
where everything is
only because it seems to be.

Here,there is
no architect for conviction,
no scientist for invention,
no artist for imitation,
no city for construction,
and no land to beach the blue endlessness.

3.
Our unlearning is a shadow that falls forward
with the quickness of a shutter for a snapshot
of that first night we spent stranded
on the sin-stained shores of our separation.

December 2008