By James Brown
You yearn so much
you could be a yacht.
Your mind has already
set sail. It takes a few days
to arrive
at island pace,
but soon you are barefoot
on the sand,
the slim waves testing
your feet
like health professionals.
You toe shells, sea glass, and odd things
that have drifted for years
and finally
washed up here.
You drop your towel
and step out of
your togs, ungainly,
first
your right foot, then
the other
stepping down
the sand
to stand
in the water.
There is no discernible
difference
in temperature.
You breaststroke in
the lazy blue.
A guy passing in a rowboat
says, “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
And it is. Your body
afloat in salt
as if cured.
Source: Poetry (February 2018)
Poet Bio
.-processed.jpg)
James Brown’s latest collection is Floods Another Chamber (Victoria University Press, 2017). He works and writes in Wellington.
More Poems about Living
Vagrants and Loiterers
You got that clean waistcoat,
the bright white of a well-tailored
shirt, you got those loose-as-sacks
slacks and some spit-polished shoes,
and you know, whether you are looking
like money, or about to take a stroll,
to tilt that hat like you own
the world; yeah, smoke...
What Women Are Made Of
We are all ventricle, spine, lung, larynx, and gut.
Clavicle and nape, what lies forked in an open palm;
we are follicle and temple. We are ankle, arch,
sole. Pore and rib, pelvis and root
and tongue. We are wishbone and gland and molar
and...
More Poems about Nature
What Women Are Made Of
We are all ventricle, spine, lung, larynx, and gut.
Clavicle and nape, what lies forked in an open palm;
we are follicle and temple. We are ankle, arch,
sole. Pore and rib, pelvis and root
and tongue. We are wishbone and gland and molar
and...
White Box
Of Tribulation, these are They,
Denoted by the White.
— Emily Dickinson
Pained, permanent
wakefulness
Exposed
in the split geode
a Santa’s grotto
Jagged milk
quartz crusts
constitute
every surface —
a mouth
all teeth
self-sharpening
like sea urchins’ —
“Uncomfortably beautiful”
toughened glass
spikes
in the doorways
of award-
winning offices
— rough
sleepers from the womb
condemned
to make of anything succulent
rock
of porticoes
iron maidens