The Sea's Women

The Sea's Women

The drops of the surf cannot reach them.
Waves sway like blades of grass
and fall forward softly,
undulating eels silently unfurling their children.

They creep up the sand,
speckled with silver worlds.
Broken snail-trails tattoo the gritty earth
as the waves merge into
a foam-edged slice of their lives.

The movement forward to their pains
is slow like the breathless swaying
of a saree's hem.
Ovoid prints perambulate
against the skin like bruises.
The gloss of their background shimmers.

The waves of the sun are blackened here.
Only the whisper of the castaway sea
rolls up to these boxed lives.

And within airless rooms
other worlds exist like islands of mists
swirling out of the past.
Memory thrashes within,
thrashes within like a flapping fish.

The eyes glaze over with scales of sardines.
The salt of the ocean smarts
the bitten lip, the bitten nipple.

Flesh refuses to split open,
wounds do not bleed their pasts,
no blood taints the moment.

The lips are dry like dead fish.
The lips are small
and the skin is taut;
but fingers can press the lips
and they yield like the sands
at the edge of the foam.

The skin does not break:
the lips' skin remains whole
like the silver surface of mackerels.

The tails of stingrays have whipped this back,
the scalpel of the past has parted the flesh here,
searching for fodder:
red without anger,
dull with the deadening memories of
waves breaking against the sky,
far away from this land of bodies.

The waves lash the slimy rocks.
Thrown back like startled goddesses,
they freeze in the nets of the air
as seagulls circle for flesh.
Fishes have grown since the last time
bodies united,
scales have dulled the ocean's green.

As weary as the sluggish sigh of
the ocean at night,
a body descends onto the absent peace
of the other,
filling the space like bubbles.
From this supine position
knowledge of the past retreats
like scampering crabs
into the grainy holes of the flesh.

This world that is poised above
like the hood of the surf
is no longer alien.

When bodies enter one another
the skin rolls back in pain
like a bandage exposing a gash:
another angered world.

The eye is red,
inflamed like the pulp of proximal memories.
It weeps like a wound.

Suddenly, the bodies of the women
burst into several worlds,
islands of splintered frenzy.
Like small furry animals
they seek to burrow into pretences
scurrying from their fright, their anger.