Blue Bodies Litter the Beach


          I stop my wife
as she is about to pick up the first jellyfish,
so blue and small it looks like a shell:
a dark mollusk or tiny anchor
from a long ago wreck
the sea has thrown up.

          A translucent mass tinted pink, blue, & purple,
beckoning even in death’s disguise:
like drowned dirigibles,
or an organ removed 
from the body of the sky
without muscle or bones, 
blood red tentacles trailing behind.

          I do not know
what that inner atmosphere is like,
or if  I could breathe the air within;
would it smell as sweet
as the serpent’s kiss,
or taste like the ocean bottom:
sand and salt and sunken skeletons.
     
          Could I look up and launch 
the pink ridge of sail,
would I see stars 
or stones of tropical reefs,
the shark’s tooth’s glint
or the sun’s glare?
Could I spare the sharp sting
of venom on my wife’s skin – 
would I beach myself, 
would I dream of ships
with sails falling off the edge of the earth?


-originally published in Iodine Poetry Journal, Fall/Winter 2011/2012: 55