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Sea Change
When one sweetheart bloodied myself in stains
And her sexton minister drained my bells
The mister of my graver bones
Shoved his ghost into the limping walls
And with my sailing man of nowhere
I crossed the channels of your spheres.
Cadaver’s belt on the animal skies
I was all zodiac of the vaulted groin
And in ram and roe-infested seas
I navigated your bubbly main
Made Jonah’s shape in my pickled beds
And fished one belly for the dead.
A sea goat shone with the mounting starseed
And my hooking pretender with a dark fish
Had time as his shift and heaven’s net his shroud
Age locked his skeleton saint in the flesh
And all figures of the sunless country
Chalked midnight on the cancer bay.
No journey through the rotating seawheel
For time’s character of the sawbone sex
Or the insect of my galactic scrawl
Measuring the fats of the mummy box
Only dolphin’s noise from the dropping west
And the druid misters of my ghost.
Through rivers where the major symbols run
He sees the spindrift shades of dolphins going
And his cross of genesis in the planted sun
(Himself the seabud of the grave sowing)
And climbing past time and the tiding shore:
Sand, evanescing footprints, and nothing more.