Trouble in mind

Cape May / Blues

Troubled, at first, by the snapping
kelp on rock whip-crack, wrack at
ebb tide where shallows fell off so
fast the whole ocean stops short, breaks.

(I sent my mind out to walk some remembered beach and still
can’t get quiet inside.) Trouble in mind, like the song, but
there’s nothing soothing about radio Broonzy singing nerve to
nerve while blues needle me with a slash-mouth, flotsam grin.

Troubled, again, by blown glassine pillows
of stranded man-of-wars, sand stained wet
where they bled out, wrecked dying colonies still
electric and lethal even here in my mind’s eye.

(I sat for seven hours one day on the seawall, long enough
for the tide to leave and come again, long enough for my heart
to beat seashell ontongenies when I went to sleep, sleep the thing
now broken.) And now, awake, recalling the green shoreline stink.

Troubled, at last, by those Os formed
when limpets leave their home scar to
graze, scours of hunger sent wandering,
wandering, belly and foot much the same.