Pilgrim

The beach was a shrine of steel in summer.
Its muscular heat stunned me face-down in prayer,

devotions buried in the scallop-shelled sand.
I was the shocked one, unable to faint

and impress the oak-smoked boys, the lavendar girls
who just stepped over me with the meanest care.

How I kissed the shore of my shame and wishing!
And eternity rushed to meet them in a wave.

Conch

My grandmother doesn’t hear me call; a white mist licks
her skull. She shuffles out to the jungle-yard
to pin a single greying cloth to the drying rack’s
sun-dial spines, the dulling weather-vane
where the fading laundry’s years have swung and aired.

The piece of washing turns its only two pages
back and forth, re-read by the wind, water veins
mapping the ground, while shadows throw vaguer
and vaguer epitaphs across the sheets snapping in the breeze.
The woman goes inside, and her door shuts again
into the memory I’ll always hold of its splintered frieze.

But my real grandmother’s sealed thousands of miles away
in her red-brick house deafened with treasure – bone-and-tulle
dancing skirts, dried quills, the family of bells
lined up in ever-decreasing size, their peals subsiding
to white noise, her shell collection emptying the sea,
vowels bleached on another shore; and from the countless shelves
she’s taken her umpteenth book to read in bed, yearning
for me, for the children, her ears burning.

The Letters I Never Sent

The miniature islands littering the sea,
uninhabited, but each with its community
of closed oysters, the fan-like debris
of the tides, elegant as parlour embroidery.

Some tornadoes never reach the ground,
whipping up an air which doesn't count.
Swept up in that unnoticed passion:
a telephone, a lousy noun, a weeping sound.

Nothing can compare, seem better than
the wear and tear of constant measuring.
Repeatedly, I tune the cello strings
but someone else will bring the weather in.

The folly of an ancient, brittle atlas.
Some die to map an error – although France
was once an unknown concept, not a task.
What commander is without her past?