Things you have lost to the wind

Swim trunks, sucked from their drying;

sunglasses vortexed

into the water; two nights

of sleep, when your door

was sledged open by the gusts.

A knife skittered to the kitchen floor.

You flew up from your sheets, sloughing

sand. And sand. And sand smeared

across your eyelids. Sand

in your bath. Sand cracking in each

bite of gigantes plaki. Dense

meat of the beans yielding

grains, coarse as bones. You have become

a sand eater, like Anthony,

who swallowed the alkaline hummocks

of the Nitrian and breathed out

glass; who lodged himself deep

in the fat of a landscape shimmering

and still and consecrated

as a bomb site. Charred stone.

Or Mehmed Pasha, that master

Turkish alchemist, who took the sands

of Deir ez-Zor and transmuted them to mass

graves. No. Leave the dunes.

Go to the docks, where the Aegean

rolls its coils, thick as adders.

The wind picks at you like a bath.

Stretch a damp cloth across your face.

Pregnant Girl Wades Naked into Canadohta Lake, Pennsylvania

The night as quiet as horses. Pulsing with

its tender agonies: a badger pulls

a worm up from the dirt, a hound sucks slurs

of blood off of its frozen paws. The

animal warmth of the boy’s breath on your back.

Predatory and blameless. You

his fertility idol his Venus

fat hipped ponderous smeared with morning dew.

Fall asleep in the back of his Chevy.

The radio buzzing like hornets.

Through the dark his vertebrae grinning

at you like a necklace of molars.

Slow as fog, belly slides into June

water, roiling with bluegill, with egg of bluegill.