Channel Islands Part I: Cymbals

Silver light crashing like cymbals- 

It's not that I have found life to be a
flat weave, or,

always to be made of manageable angles:

but saltgrass is wavering somewhere,
and there are thirty kinds of sunflowers on the island,

and no one lives there and no one ever will again,
just some mice and little blue crabs.

And my body receives the data of your body,
and wraps it up,
softly adapts

to its weather, its riparian zones,
growing more and more familiar

like the same person come a-knocking on the door
several weeks in a row.

Even rivers have tides sometimes.
It's not unusual to night-bloom.

A new creek courses down my calf. It
bypasses scrubby chaparral-

I could sleep through the whistling Sundowners,
I could sleep through a rattling gale.

I could efface my sunburn with pumice
and lay beneath the solar wave.

I could roll in dust, chew succulents
caress the fault line.

I've been embraced between the wings.

That singular manzanita knows
my coordinates

and I'm collecting records
of your tides