A soft blanket of blue rolls onto the shore
Capturing all it meets in a chilly tickled hug
Carving

every time you call my body a masterpiece i have to wonder
if you would appreciate the vessel more

It splashed
Turner
as he bathed
in the light.

It rolls in slowly,
slowed,

Line upon line
Waves crash in
An inexhaustible

Succession smashing
Against the

Two hundred summer
thaws come and go
before his cold-slowed
heart stops pumping

blood

sea embraces sand
and waves wait their turn
to dissolve rock.

The universe expands
from every

I stand
Sand stirs beneath my feet
Slips through my toes to the beat of the sea
Breathing,

Clouds above us, feet in sand.
You toddle beside me clutching my hand.

Bucket sloshes with

Where the earth meets the sky, we shall walk you and I.
Seagulls soar and caw, the scavengers of

An enraged newborn sun
Flares at the meeting
Of crushed silk sky
And elephant skin sea.

Northern sunlight entices
Gentle hills into seas
Where companionable seals
Rip fish apart.

Lines of men
Die of thirst
In a desert,

Their white foam
Fingernails clawing
At the

The waves
Smack my legs
And my toes
Sink deep
Into liquid sand.

I look
At the sea
And feel

The waves diminish slowly,
A tide retreating from a brutal flood;
Where once I stood and felt

In the harbour
An old clinker-built boat
Rose, and now falls
On the swell.

Once brightly

White and smooth,
Pocketed flat and small.

The Kittiwakes squat
In sandstone cliffs,
Decaying

The old stone breakwater
Proudly juts from Portugal
Almost to Brazil.

Alone, our legs dangle