Metamorphoses at Rock Harbor

Prone on the sand, burnt hollow, beyond resolution,
Having explored the flesh of exhausted August,
I woke to the hug of surf and cobalt horizon,
Salt still at my tongue from the swimming, tune
Of the wind in dune grasses thin in my head.

On the rocks flared in the spill of sun,
Foam jagged there like a broken shell,
The hair of a mermaid risen from dead
Depths where the snouts of the green-bred
Dogfish snuffle the bones of sailors undone
By fantasy, lustful for streaming
Shoulders caught upright, for shuddering breasts.

I, racked by the legend, scraped by the scales,
Awaking to knowledge:

beach, the radio screaming

With jazz, the yellow umbrella, the sand,
Waxed paper and mustard, blue water breaking, sundered
By plungers, a gull that soared in the sun.

The southwest fog coated the sky with salt;
The mermaid smiled at the sailor:

O human child !

Years of my daughter, with sunpeeled nose, eyes mild
And blue as a saint’s, hair damp with the spray,
Brushed with a delicate wrist:

Your knees danced

Like the waves, your blaze fired the fog when you ran away.

Prone on the beach, my throat within reach
Of Davy the pander, my bones barnacled gone,
Green stones in the damned coronet of Poseidon,
Eye-jelly, artery, armpit, and brain,
I am gone to the white belly rolling to rip,
To the blood-threads curling from closing jaws,
To the teeth clamped through the ragged flesh,
To the gut and the nerve of the muscle of ocean,
The predator, the torpedo, the black destroyer.