Two Lovers And A Beachcomber By The Real Sea

Cold and final, the

Shuts down its fabled summer house;

Blue views are boarded up; our sweet

Dwindles in the hour-glass.

Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid

Tangling in the tide's green

Now fold their wings like bats and

Into the attic of the skull.

We are not what we might be; what we

Outlaws all

Beyond the interval of now and here:

White whales are gone with the white ocean.

A lone beachcomber squats among the

Of kaleidoscope

Probing fractured Venus with a

Under a tent of taunting gulls.

No sea-change decks the sunken shank of

That chucks in backtrack of the wave;

Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on,

A grain of sand is all we have.

Water will run by; the actual

Will scrupulously rise and set;

No little man lives in the exacting

And that is that, is that, is that.