


Your betrayal was not your departure,
Not the violence of the oars,
But leaving me where I could not forget.
I awoke, palms down on a lone sand,
All eyes and mouth, to find the hawsers
Massacred, and you gone without a sound.
No footfall or the folding in of a farewell,
Only a mute blue plinth with no epitaph
And the sky gaping at its own wound.
Under a moon with a scythe for a smile,
The waves mantle and unearth my feet.
Angered by memory, rust forgets how to sleep.
At night, your valleys return,
I place an ear to the earth and hear
Your runes move in a stone-eyed dark.
Love looks up at an adamantine sea,
And believes it can walk on water.
All my prophecies have grown wings,
I am calling them in wind-tongued,
Rush-voiced, my creances winding
Nooses and cradles around my wrists.

