The sea turns over like a band in a factory machine,
stamping out widgets unattended all night, wheels of motion
that grind the salt in the air exquisite fine.
Bodies separate from their minds. High on the pier, the oystermen
hack up hard cultches, breaking off pearls of moonlight
like the sea’s loose orthodontia strewn in their catch.
Merchants scrutinize bellies of thick sailfish, searching
for signs of malfeasance or rot. These are punishing hours
above the beach breathing white and insomniac,
the salt baths shining in the stars like rice water.
No one knows what’s easy and what is difficult.
Siddhartha thought desire was the cause of hardship,
but hardship is the cause of hardship.

Just like you the birds wake up hungry in the morning.
The sea is still undressing in the blush of stars
when they round up the discarded dead from nets and buckets.
Waves finger tide pools like raccoon hands polishing a stone.
Somehow the breakbone cold sloughs off the jetties; the oystermen
crate up their catch in even counts. The birds get their fill
except the ones who don’t. Did anyone say
one day the calm would last, the fence held steady in its crescent
around the dune grass, the sea still in its solid block of night?
Who says you deserve the life you have?
A shearwater slings its body in the air like smoke,
weighed on the stressed winds of the Gulf Stream, tired before it starts.