Dear Emma

Dear Emma,


you raised every man

your child in touch



I was once of them,

A flower’s dye, alive

on the endless palm

of your kanga,


In twilight I still see

the slow draw

of your long fingers

loving like water


what it holds


An Islander’s Pocket of Time

An Islander’s Pocket of Time



The canals lining the mind of what I hear

dowse in the gushing voice of the cowry


An ocean becoming,

whirls in the mouth of a hermit’s lost shell,


where sound coombes and constellates

only to break

and wisp itself, thin amid

the fingerlings of driftwood

water became.



Thoughts lag behind, whip-

whispers of blind sand contour-

over the lone casuarina,

tracing listless,

the history of the wind

in leaves


empty tipped rivers

into the ceramic ash of shore


Distant limbs sweep over their brittle markings

continuously retouching could never be finished-


The meanders left languid by a toe, drag in the sand

a boy’s journey               and endless loop back home



stands my body


The feet

are both below

and thirteen worlds

beside me, whole.


They walk in tow,

One is young,

One is old,

and too slow

For the four steps

it holds



Slur, perception, slur. Detach limbless

pendular tentacles of one imagination

to all,


the dark mute dissolution of chaos, solaces

in the rhythmical will of the universe,

white moths snow from the inkwell eye

unfathomed by the ocean’s wandering murmur


A path to a part apart of the past,

and the catalyst of eternal evanescence

splays from the waves as they peel and spray,

slip and spill           the self, lost adrift

the continual spume of elemental law,


to draw from outward rupture, the calming clatter

of beingless breath, met

within the obscure, clammed core of matter.


I.               Seem me among the moonsun minutes of dawn,

along the waneless, half-day crest

of tropospheric froth,


a dugong,

unglassed on the undulate surface of the past


Half the equal, reflected upon

the sea you no longer see, met in imagery;

a vicarious leaf, springs under laminal skin-


the palimpsest of experience.


A fisherman with no line but the bow-

broken horizon. No rheumatic tan

of turquoise death

from the dolphin fish bled of water,

but the hue of its imagination

in the greenest grain of aging color

I became.



Sit with me awhile,

graze upon the shallows of time, lull

in the giant gaze of her endless motion


wait-a-minute, amidst this feeling felt as the tide

rocking us in         and out of coral swept vision

You are as lawless

as the shift       ing pigment

of what you create,


watching as stars swim winged beneath

the night of a waking sea.


You do not speak for the nakedness of being

nor pin pierce the wilderness of innocence,

the ever masked symbol

patching the collage of your ontology,


but in yourself lay you long enough to exist

rich in the iridescent essence of things

yet too small to be seen

by the science of daylight.


For I have sailed somewhere unseen

in-between the oneness behind two paths,

ahead of the future birthing the past


in the lunacy of one season, blown


in the soulless shade of the kuzi,


thunder, oscillating and outstretched

to mind beached men, and yet


no more than the trade of wind

flapping skin like a breathless sail,


a nomad seen balancing freedom

on the sinking teak of a dhow,


or a mangrove’s distant drifting finger,

already-born seedling of its imagining.



In the circular swallow of reason

the mind becomes what it undoes

and the body is no longer

a bridge

crossed, when one cannot swim.