SYNTAX
 

Reeds, mud grip, shell that forms only
upon shell, this marsh rising and falling
to sea-pulse, moon-drag: news of itself
the only front-page effort worth its
time.  I'm bored with self, the drop-out
ego abashed at how little it confounds
the tide's addiction.  I'm fed up with
a name lifting itself into the breeze
of opinion, the sky's azure only air
that curves to authoring roundness.
 
Nothing steps out of nature.  Nothing
returns from the vast water that does
not crave its tidal beginning.  Look
across Calibogue Sound, at the three-masted
dredge adding ocean floor to Daufuskie Island:
spewing sand and broken bi-valves, crackled
carapaces, torn whip coral stag-horn
weed, the sea's waste like the mind's
creaturely ideas sinking to the bottom,
pulverized into voiceless god-ground poverty.
 
A turning over.  Shuck and thrust.  Hurled
column and collapse.  A foothold reappearing
further from tidy lawns and a porch
filled with tourists in peaked caps, their
glinting binoculars tilted to a sight-line
low as this row of belly-wet pelicans
close to white-caps, profile pterodactyl,
their glide precise as a hand moving over
text, without hesitation, instincted
to its course.  Sucking sound.  Fume-moan.
Stinking blackness.  Shuddering belts,
sudden fling:  the given-up now the only
given.
                                    
                           
 

SCENES FROM THE PASSING WORLD
  

Remember those Japanese prints and the tale of pines
who softened down their length to become human? 
Even if we wore the ceramic masks of an aged
couple crossing the Chechesee River Bridge in sudden rain,
   
the same rain beating down the old rice fields 
all over Jasper County,
 
by morning you'd be the girl holding her loose sleeve
to her face, while I read from a scroll of plum blossoms,
 
promising rejuvenation, describing this beach, this littoral, 
these washed-up leopard crabs snipping the air to right
themselves,
 
the tangle of whelk egg casing an interior thrown
clear, each pin-prick hole a birth toward hardness
drawn from the sea,
 
a dim light moving like the brush of an
artist mourning the pleasure districts
passing from the memory of his city,
 
time and the narrow bridge over Broad River
the spans that grayness begets of gray,
 
the ante-bellum silence of old homes
in Beaufort the humid intake of an unjust age
and the sweet crumbling of a luncheon cake,
 
this moment given for walking through the cast-
up swash line into early evening, dried spartina
crackling beneath our step,
 
loss and waste washing into the sea, pelicans
gliding out of fog, their long faces shaped to hunger.