In the Waves

“And here I am
Standing in your sad arrest
Trying to do my very best”
—Van Morrison, ‘Astral Weeks’

Wants on a roadmap astrally placed by talk before we faced forms.
Girl on a beach—on a beach. On my beach asleep with all red lines
And duck feathers: I have the rock, I swear. “It is the best ever!” I swore to her.

We didn’t fall where our child couldn’t.
We looked from the window resistant but we slowly relented
Resenting with them.

I wish the band would play—I think your slips would hear that:
A boy dying in an armchair; a long long race: “Look, girl!”
Not enough for anyone from a closed view.

I am going through too many fields these past two five years
And I see him standing in yours; and you are going home to a house
Where that movie whistles to you—I know. To that maddening, I know.

I cannot tell you though: the looping and looping and looping
Of your scenes; the rubbing of finger and thumb and I tricking I:
Duck feathers; wrong flavour. Will you smoke them?

I hope one of us doesn’t kill the other. I don’t want to finish
The words now: I feel here. I absolutely know
This is not what to say, only how to say it.

Girl on a beach. Weeks ago I had the girl on a beach all my lines
And slips and feathers—a closed window—a fast house in the clouds—
Too small a rock on my map. But you were on mine:

The bands played you all the time without a notice from me:
I don’t want it to get to the slow song and this is the last album
Of our venture, surely. It pointed to you before form, so long ago

In a studio before us. He surely couldn’t have known: I have to be vague
But it is going through something it must be going
Through something as I am, “Car sick

Only now. Not at sea alone please.
Mapped before us in our own free field, I swear,
I swear—please…”

Still not here nor there—nowhere—
But gone past.
A boy waiting in the waves.