THORPE MOECKEL

  V2n2/V2n3
Spr/Sum 04
 
 

Dix Island Serenade

   
 

Time is long with listening. Night longer.
Gulls, throatsore with beauty, jack up
even the foghorn’s snoring. Forget
what edge of tongue
they sand,
bespruced one; your eyes are racy
that way, each a barnacle

hungry for sleeptides, clinging. Meanwhile
the moon clothespins this burnpile
to the daisy’s innermost. And you watch,
urchin

succulently barbed. What’s seen
is little blue people hotelling in ledge,
wonder hauling off its punt,
the cardinal points mouth to mouth. God,

there’s too much. Cormorants open
their oils to the south. Astonishments
tinkle in the rocks. With each surge, keen
to smooch wavelips. But wings

are questions whose froth frosts the wrack,
quarries the remains. Nothing is leveled out
Even so,
insatiables collide. Every rock
is a river again,

waves turns pink before breaking. There’s rejoice
clapping its hands on ledge. Lichen, those thumbprints of becoming,
have stolen the X from ecstatic. It’s cute

how insistence denies itself,
the mussels’ shyness, pegmatite,
orthoclase. But heapage, dear, won’t you swim
in the fritillaries of morning’s elbow. At least,

speak of the revenant that weaves marriage
and dismay. You are always learning here
that suffer is its own release, that talon
is fishspine’s ghost. But who teaches
that clarify and understand

are butter, are
render?

   
 
 

Thorpe Moeckel lives in North Carolina. He is the author of Odd Botany (Silverfish Review Press, 2002) and a chapbook, Meltlines (Van Doren & Co., 2001).