I sit on the seawall in Poipu
Thinking of Neruda in Isla Negra
With cancer and his sea skeletons
Gutted by moon and his vocabulary
Of marine things with their fins
And fluid destinies,
With their fortunes exposed
In the colossus of salt
Where they ache for completion
Beneath currents of arrested passion
And the frail geometry of love
And how the waves redeem them,
Deathless, resurrected, infinitely alert
In these liquid female worlds.

I am forty and tropical.
Torch ginger grows near my mouth.
The red lamps of the islands,
The red lamps of mythology,
Of hibiscus, of all deserted
Women on balconies
And the wharves
With one last red rose
In their silent mouths.

In the long days I take
My board to the waves.
I tell my daughter
Not to be afraid.

These are my vows at forty,
To measure and accept
Without increment,
Petals, canvas, shell.
There is no death or disease.
There is no cancer in Isla Negra
Where the whales are passing south
Swelling the ocean with intelligence.
There is the process only
The blue divinities
And clothing drying between palms
In the flagrant renegade air.
And the red mouths of hibiscus
And torch ginger near my cheek
And the essence of heretics
And the sound of waves tame
After storms.

Somewhere a god is born
To gather the wayward waters,
The ransacked winds,
The skeletons of drowned horses,
The poppies, the volcanoes
And the throats dense with prayer. 

Copyright 2005-2006, Kate Braverman.