The rain to the wind said,

Take your nakedness to the sea
and lie down at the tide line while the tide is still out.
Lie down at the wrack-ridge where sand pipers skitter
over dried seaweed, your whole body exposed that way,
your whole spirit exposed as you lie waiting.

With your whole spirit exposed as you lie waiting,
remember all that has passed that led to this place.
Remember the tall fields of childhood—
how you nested in the small circumferences your body
hollowed out in hip-high grasses, how the sun filled
the circle of sky you could see from that perspective.

Only the circle of sky you could see from that perspective
was contained enough to blanket you with its comfort.
Sometimes small quick swallows transected the wholeness,
their flights, diameters. Beneath you, the shaken universe
of the insects went on without your knowing. Out of your own
shaken world, Orphan, you had escaped to lie there

as in this shaken world you have escaped to lie here
naked and waiting at the perimeter of the sea,
for the tide that will, in only hours it seems,
return and wash over you, its watery brine a balm
on your face, its foam spreading under you,
lifting you like the mother you lost, her arms extended.

As it lifts you like a lost mother, your arms extended,
you will become a raft, bones rope-bound, wood buoyant,
and give in to the back and forth rolling of your own heartbeat
which keeps its watch over your body, which will become the sea,
which is, even now, beginning to be washed out, washed
into the waves and long sweep of wild waters.

Into the waves and the long sweep of wild waters,
you bequeath your grief, the many griefs that have entered your cells
and left their mark, the way algae clogging a pond surface
with its heavy green layer hides clear water. You bequeath the days
when your heart was a carousel of rise and fall.
You bequeath the reins. You let all you meant to control go.

The world you wanted to control and could not—you let it go
into the distances, into long sweep of wild waters.
You wait to be lifted by waves, mother-lightly, your arms extended,
away from the shaken world, Orphan, you have been wanting to escape,
all the sky you can see from that wide perspective will fall into the sea,
your whole spirit exposed as you lie here at tide line waiting—

nor because good fences make good neighbors (they do,
           but my neighbor is more competent than I),
           nor because the old ones are rotten, though they are, surely,
but because the earth feels more familiar the deeper I go,

in its crumbled alternating veins of warm and cool,
           as if, beyond the instinctive dread of suffocation
           and darkness, lay a return to something I had known,
a kind of tender vertigo, and I am unable

to decide whether or not I should resist.
           These four-by-fours, of course, would make a fine martyrdom,
           but I know that story, and it's different from
this feeling of recovering something lost:

a bit of faience ware, a buried silver spoon,
           a rusted padlock or a toy paratrooper,
           his arms folded patiently across his chest since the year
the boy lost him, playing, who has become a man.

Draw a line. Write a line. There.
Stay in line, hold the line, a glance
between the lines is fine but don't
turn corners, cross, cut in, go over
or out, between two points of no
return's a line of flight, between
two points of view's a line of vision.
But a line of thought is rarely
straight, an open line's no party
line, however fine your point.
A line of fire communicates, but drop
your weapons and drop your line,
consider the shortest distance from x
to y, let x be me, let y be you.

Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn't last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder to the attic?

The one presided over by armed men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and alleys,
while loudspeakers declared a new era,
and the house around you grew bigger,
the rooms farther apart, with more and more
people missing?

The photographs whispered to each other
from their frames in the hallway.
The cooking pots said your name
each time you walked past the kitchen.

And you pretended to be dead with your sister
in games of rescue and abandonment.
You learned to lie still so long
the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled
safety of a wing. Look! In
run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,
turning over the furniture,
smashing your mother's china.

Don't fall asleep.
Each act opens with your mother
reading a letter that makes her weep.
Each act closes with your father fallen
into the hands of Pharaoh.

Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,
still a child, and slow to grow.
Still talking to God and thinking the snow
falling is the sound of God listening,
and winter is the high-ceilinged house
where God measures with one eye
an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,
and counts on many fingers
all the ways a child learns to say Me.

Which childhood?
The one from which you'll never escape? You,
so slow to know
what you know and don't know.
Still thinking you hear low song
in the wind in the eaves,
story in your breathing,
grief in the heard dove at evening,
and plentitude in the unseen bird
tolling at morning. Still slow to tell
memory from imagination, heaven
from here and now,
hell from here and now,
death from childhood, and both of them
from dreaming.

It's because the earth continues to wobble on its axis
that we continue to stumble down the streets of the heart.
It's because of the loneliness of the first cell trying to swim
through its primordial pool that we are filled with a kind of
galactic fear. For example: one moment a rocket falls
capriciously into a square. Another moment, a rogue wave
turns over the fishing boat whose crew leaves their memories
floating like an oil slick that never reaches shore.
In this way we understand our dying loves scratching at the door.
In this way, each love creates its own theory of pain. Each love
gnaws the derelict hours to the bone. But because there are
so many blank spaces in history we still have time
to write our own story. Wittgenstein said our words have
replaced our emotions. He never understood how
we have to cleanse ourselves of these invisible parasites
of doubt and fear. We might as well worry about
the signals from dead worlds wandering around the universe
forever. Think instead of how the trees prop up the sky.
How the rain falls into the open eyes of the pond
bringing a vision no one expected. Here's mine: this bee
hovering over the pencil seems to bring a message from
the deepest flowers you inhabit. Because I don't know
where all this love has come from, because the clouds are
covered with our footsteps that know no time, I am
no longer surprised when each day comes from a new place,
because in this way, I can imagine these words getting lost
in your lungs, my fingers curling inside you as if I could
gather you inside my own heart, or tracing the slope of your hip
towards a whole other world. Don't worry. Like us the planet
wobbles because of the shifting hot and cold zones, high
and low pressures, the pull of tides. The stars that are
these words are always closer than we think despite
the theories of astronomers. In this way, I will always be there,
a rain falling into the sea, the abandoned light opening your eyes
despite the curtains of reason, the life you give each time
you turn to me, because the stumbling breaths we borrow
from each other are all we have to keep each other alive.