Foreign and alone, I hear the waves.
Memories arrive like flotsam and refuse
to leave. By moonlight, I discern their outlines.
A man’s distant laughter. A red pinprick, far out on the water.
Paperback Aciman and Venetian cologne: tobacco and honeysuckle.
Makeshift rosaries, recalling all.
Pigeons huddle beneath the corbels of a widow’s seafoam villa,
speaking in hushed tongues like Roman Christians.
Sunless on the beach I pray, to Jesus or Neptune
and await the parted waves, the still smallness
cleaved by hippocamps, or else as Enoch.
The ocean blabbers on.
