TRIPTYCH

---

Sun horse, night mare,
Ride what you find there.

i.

Three minutes,

no longer, in this cold ocean, you no longer feel
the margins of your body; contracted but whole,

your nerves reporting back from a shrinking perimeter,
you think you are swimming, homunculus,

but the limbs don't answer. The skin out there is gone,
that divided water from water.

~

Sleep

by the ocean's a double solvent.
The soul swims out of the body and joins

salt and the isolate tidal life of cells. Diatom,
rotifer, I was a colony. Now they are free.

~

The ocean breathes

like a big cat next to our bed. The dream it made
is gone. Body, be still, be safe. It's just

adrenalin's druggy buzz, a homemade panic
the nerves cook up in the dark, their boredom.


ii.
The sun on my skin where I met the world
all day, the light I read his face by, touch, the whole

of what I saw and did not see, now, at 3 a.m.
draws back to the marrow and burns. Who said

the conscious mind is like a flashlight? Whatever
it looks at is bright. This is a glowing universe, it thinks,

what's real is light. But the ocean I didn't attend to is in
my nerves, the stitch in my ankle partway up the cliff

trail, and Muzak and the riverrun of breathing,
all kindle in the cells.

His short laugh burns there, and the water's purr,
and our bodies loose to gravity.

I want to tell him, love, on this planet, we wake
on the beast's back, dream of its waking.

By morning, at breakfast, I will not remember,
and now he is sleeping.


iii.
Three minutes, one hundred-eighty seconds-- each
divisible as light, as shades in the the water,

so long, the blade of moonlight opens
a shallow trough into greens the eye

could study all night,
if the body could stay here.

Sparking and tacking in deeper blues,
the mind works its perfect doll of a swimmer.

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