Sky Ward

Ocean Street

39 Ocean Street to Alice Coltrane uuu blue or white or very far away every avenue a rain-stroked aisle through the wild wind’s theater far to the barque floating in the last row your self laddered to an avenue of sound last streak of white-gold found in lines along the branches or in the branches are you a branch that tries from the bark to speak cold roar of the ocean you cannot speak how loud the blue-gray morning how loud when you dissolved into sound when you dissolved April into the soul’s endless question what was your body but a first uncertain answer 40 uuu always awakened awakened and left reft the wait’s blue hollow sightless an oracle trying to tell what recedes and what’s left a shirt left crumpled in the sand in the mist you balance on a board the shape of a prayerbook racing along the surface toward the rocks finding in the water a pounding afterlife sound that undresses itself prayerbook spun to unravel answering the eroding cliffs and dunes dear orange shafts of late morning speaking backward and in tongues 41 uuu wet-suited supplicants balancing on boards racing for shore how do you find your self deeply in the forest on the ocean floor dear snake-haired woman who wondered to some the book in sound you wrote was thunder it is one thing to be lost another to be left seeking a slogan a sloka your own body dear country-dark houseflown homewrecker shy in the blackness telling how you sailed again to arrive to found yourself in sound dear hold me seen or sign the unsoundable notes saying dare to leave home drop everything did the universe write them or did you 42 uuu every aisle a rain-stroked avenue breathlessly quoted a letter in space of the sea’s blue promise each spring I lie on the surface of the sea hoping to stand aloft my shirt crumpled in front of the empty-hearted tree one sleeve pointing the way to nowhere beach wantonly disappearing every day though I did not believe when with your breath you made a bridge and dreamed myself wrong my strange and weary road my unkempt figure my blue whisper winter god whose center in the moment unwilling to be warm eternal the winter eternal the wind unmaking your will will and whisper my anger my lantern my spaceless wick but how my tenuous prayerboard can a supplicant balancing on the surface know anything about depth 43 uuu struggling out of the waves moon a little red illegible whole sky starless in the late hour I didn’t tell you wrote into me the answer or a map to follow boardless and battered heaved ashore on the pulled-back day in the effort of ache where did I swim in from water that wholly disappears into air or does not disappear speaking underwater because afraid to be heard nothing after no one waiting for me sky and sky the same grave gray that terrifies turning the page of breath where I left myself without sound into the air I spell each spring like “swan” noises from the next room keep you awake god that was a noise in the night at the foot of the bed claiming kinship or revival transcribing the ghost-notes onto the sheets we who each divine our self in spite of ourselves running wildly boards under our arms back into the sea 44 uuu in case of warmth the oceans will rise strange cup to move through after the continents came together after you swam crazy through the storm to shore after you asked for it after you drove yourself relentlessly into the sea we listen to one gust after the other a gorgeous scale in the most ordinary range drumming the time of the sea into a signature of leaves twenty minutes of ecstasy blue and after the blue, blue-white a buoy, a sandpiper, a wholesale slaughter of blue either way the harp’s plucked chords like the fog or the answer of water dissolved into the shore’s copious footnotes transcribing the music onto ebbing surface a missing word where continents rub together disappear or dispel the notion there is any such word worth knowing a...