After beach and bishopric,
A bar in a bus station
The Diana, where we take coffee and cold water
Is more like the real life of
A movie of a certain sort
Than that movie could be
A made-up blonde brings ice
Two Mormon elders, pressed shirts,
Smiles, sprawl, far from home
A girl flicks the top of her shorts
So the man in the booth opposite,
Hirsute, can see the rose print beneath
The heat bores me stupid, here
Only slightly inland, a south
For men in white, women in black
From tip to honey toe
On the shore, though
People inhabit their bodies
So when I say bodies
I mean essence, and
Not the other
Stones underwater gleam like bodies, green
So manybodies, none minding
That I seek that much surface
Sleek and gold
Slack and dark
Betraying degrees of away
My own strawberry-prickled legs
The white of strangers and exiles
Or reddened guests, overdoing it
Or labourer brown
Or the breadcrust glow of homebodies
Naked islanders
Naked island
A bare hillside flecked with gorse
Dark spots on a flank
My sister's, skin misremembered, unknown, adult
How shy we've become
And that breath
An exhalation of hair
On the frame of the nineteen-year-old on his boat
Shirtless at dinner
Is it unconscious or half so
The way a man rubs his chest
The hand moving downward
Through the hair there
Arrived, all at once, in himself
--Split, 2006
