Ocean Body

If I tell you that I am an island,
a small desert place of quiet abruption,
the tips of my fingers dipped in cold ocean waves and
my toes curled over sandy edges,
I mean to say that i am cut-off,
far-off, cut-apart,
a life of water between me and the world.

If i were to say to you that I grew up here,
among the sea-bird sea-nests tangled in salty hair,
engulfed by deep dark ocean weeds and scattered fishbones,
I mean to say that once i might have been a peninsula,
tied to my mother by string and flesh and blood,
but the little earth-bridge flooded by some mind-image,
and I grew older surrounded by mirror water,
the world within the reach of my fingertips
but washed-over, unreachable, unimaginable, unbridgeable.

And so my limbs became mountains,
familiar and lonely
rising above that clear horizon of still glass.
And my hair turned into sea foam,
a quiet tugging and pulling and
clinging to the edges.
And my fragmented being I paint
on a white canvass made of island sand,
with a brush made of seaweed
and a copper cup filled with the water that swallows my lungs.