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Here smooth limbs insinuate. Something blind undoes in darkness: Child, this is a phase. Over the covers you flow. Should wind be the mother of fear, I feed you Doubt. You toss caution to the floor. Say that’s not scary again, I’ll show you. Your pleasure’s worn. You wear it— the long alluvial grin. If monster is all that scares you then I’ll send them. This is your childhood. Come in. 32 To the better view With the better view out back, we sit where storefronts dangle starfish on strings (for your rearview mirror, for your Christmas tree), shirts festooned with sandbuckets, and the titular rumble of ocean is only a backdrop to a thought we might or might not have, the way traffic sounds back home (back home—the freeway sounds around us—we tell ourselves that’s the ocean).

He rises too and leans ahead, always a step or two behind, and kind of pushes her along. 53 Child and Woman The moon is bigger than the girl is. It rises as she bends, the woman. The girl behind her. And the moon rising Immense and round Filling up sight until knowing rests Like a yellow dragonfly on a yellow leaf. Until it flies the girl will not know it’s there. It is all the girl sees For now, the enormity and then the whiteness of it Before the others arrive strange With laughter, to the bathhouse.

There is only one way to get there: departure. But the river now is jumpy in our wake, & loneliness attends me like the printed dress that keeps turning up one summer on different women, (different colored hair). 23 Distances at Sea for S. T. I let my eyelids hover unshut like things adrift in case a ship should pass at such distance I’d see it; mine was a small boat. My gunwales welcomed a wash of the smaller fish casting themselves sideways, flattening, clearing the sides like high-jumpers in order to take bites from my legs.