I will tell you what happened between the sea

and the reef. It started in the mountains,

bare rock buried in the high grasses

near Japanese guns and the generator house,

the rusted barrels breaking to pieces

in untended fields of taro, where no one

can touch them. My sons have gone to a place

I can’t say. They took the Southern Cross

and the first signs of Venus, the faded sketches

of stars and current pull, the continental push.

They were good in the beginning. My sons.

My sons. Their names are words I can’t say.

I know by my skin, the burn and the void

in my mouth. They will never be men.

 

 

The sleep we have under a tin roof. The silence

we stole from standing birds on a sand bar,

picking the cheeks of a fish. How the hands

return insistently, the limp weight, wind

growing thin in the shy turns of the head,

the dream’s lucid vines dried in thatch-weave

beneath us. What the moon means

in its dimpled trance, wild green light

remade in the tilt  and bend of our bodies,

trapped space tunneled from under us,

the dream reflecting what comes and goes

from gathering clouds over Tol, growing

in the slow slide of sand crabs, the remembered hush

of palm leaves, heat-streaks cutting the sky

in two. Imagine the leaps we take in the Southern Cross,

constellating angles, the navigated current

dipping clean from star to star. Imagine sails

becoming full, showing their threaded, skin-thin

lines of light, and the dream becoming more

than ticking sound the turtle makes on bare rock

of the reef or the rush of the ocean floating a wave

over its hidden head, lifting the webbed feet,

the faded shell, worn water breaking the surface.

 

 

 

 

Our lord is tall and strong and tends his lambs. He faces west.

He holds a half-shredded staff in a hand held up by a vine.

Here are the girls in the churchyard holding hands, hanging leis

on our lady’s neck, stacking them so her face purples and yellows

with petals and pollen, the twine pressed on her lips.

Here are the boys loitering, half-drunk from Gem Clear, splayed

on the side of the ridge, praying the Creed by heart. In the crèche,

in the copra husk cradle, our lord’s eyes are crossed and bleached,

glazed, specked grey from salt and the rain that drains through

his plastered hair, his skull, the split bridge of his nose.

Here the columns are Roman and ragged. They chip when touched.

If it is true, then when the cisterns crack and clouds part

from where a man once roped the moon from the sky, he will come

with cloaks and nets overflowing, a canoe glistening at the grains.

The sweetest water will fall and flood the ruts from upland homes,

and higher yet to the peaks and plateaus, to the land left

from the last wounds, from holy men. Here the rocks

that build the road recede. They tilt and pull apart. They scatter

to the mangrove swamp where the jagged root-knives divide fish

from their bodies, trapped on the shore with the sand,

with other bones, how they might shine when shaded.

Here the women we love sing to the tradewinds, let their voices flatten

and billow in the blossoms, in the stems picked clean of fruit.

Here the steeple’s bottom beam bends, and where the head should rest

metal is twisted and tangles the dead leaves, making knots.

The women we love wear dresses that puff and press, their shapes

gone real in pillar grooves, the haloed patches of dead grass,

gusts curving through the walkway to where the doubled door was,

altared aisle, the unhinged pews not fit for kneeling, holes in the walls

where windows once cast saints in the churchyard, in the village–

Anthony, Stephen. They could be the third lungs, our lost songs.