#sonnet variation

The sea unfolds itself onto the sand Again, again. It drags its yellow hem Across our feet and back. You hold my hand And sing to me, the first bar of a hymn: Abide with me. The phrase, unfinished, slides Away into the dusk. The world’s wet rim Keeps wrinkling on the sky. The eventide’s Upon us now, the turning of the day, The long slow ebb as everything subsides Into the dark. The sea in…

for Beth Once when her kisses were fire incarnate and left in their imprint bright lipstick, and flame, when her breath rose and fell over smoldering dunes, leaving me listlessly sighing her name … Once when her breasts were as pale, as beguiling, as wan rivers of sand shedding heat like a mist, when her words would at times softly, mildly rebuke me all the while as her lips did more wildly…

All the twists in all the tongues, all the zeroes, all the ones, all the arms of all the goddesses, all the names of the nameless and bodiless, all the ways the all- one embodies, all at once, the alls there are, all our alleles and alphabets, all the forms, yes all, even the sestina, all our alternating lives and deaths, all the kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, all the peoples borderless as…

All that’s left of Ireland is her hair—bright carrot—and her milkmaid-pallid skin,her brilliant air of cavalier despair,her train of children—some conceived in sin,the others to avoid it. For nowhereis evidence of thought. Devout, pale, thin,gay, nonchalant, all radiance. So fair! How can men look upon her and not spinlike wobbly buoys churned by her skirt’s brisk air?They buy. They grope to pat…