Relic Environments Trilogy: Book I, Part 1.iv

from Book I, Part 1, Mystery Tramp Eclogues

The English Beach

 

The winds are from Africa. As far as the Azores

the weather continues warm, sieving pumice

through hibiscus plums and reds.

The waiter tops the flutes before he goes—

star-shaped cuts of melon in the bowl, not less

than other shrines, makeshift of the same eternity.

The clouds are in the mountains, firstly,

patternless humidity drawn shoreward to the cape

in sunset ransoms of late rain.

Above the dialect of childhood faces,

a sticky milk ripens in the fronds. We name it

with labials, with burnt-cork vowels.

A gritty skirt of language, of empty pleas,

of the names kept from us always,

the playa decorates this old volcano.

On islands the sun holds close, strangers

dance to phrases of lost love, dovetailed to the middle bars

where, higher still, trade winds bridge the cold calderas.