fragment from a hand-held device #3

a memory came to him of swimming in the dams at the farms of his friends.  how the cold water lay eighteen inches or maybe years below the surface, and would caress the limbs;  stretching its hard fingers through the syrupy warmth to catch and clutch.  how it could tighten around the chest like a python, and squeeze breath from the body.  those fingers, that would sometimes steal a small child or a drunken man, and give them back empty.

those fingers.

that need.

one does not stop loving

i'm not sure i have enough fingers.
one does not stop loving.

each of you i hold
in cupped hands, dreaming
and with each
dream
dream
dream

each pain and pinch and slap
each loss and lack
each shovelful at the foot
of the mountain

i hold you all, and my fingers
remember
remember
remember

sshhhh
i will hear no voices

but my meat remembers
meat
meat
meat

and the slap
of flesh on flesh

and the meeting of
meat
meat
meat

i say these syllables
into meaninglessness

i stare at my fingers

and i love you
all
all
all

nowhere is it said
that one must stop

and i will not.




.

diver

surfacing through
greenswell, hefting
his netted finds aboard

the deck tilts.
nothing ever
washes away.

somewhere
in all these shells must be
the nacre-smothered grain
for which he bursts
his lungs.


later, beached,
the tops of his toes
skinned by his rubber fishfins,
sand crusts with blood and wounds
are roughly mortared closed.

tomorrow he will open them afresh.


later still
while casting for bait,
he is stabbed by memory

of a time when bright steel was enough.