Secrets in their tiny boxes, dreams sleep in glass,
occasionally you fish them out to swim among
the ordinary stones, hoping to catch a glance
of her floating hair and beryl-colored scaled
fins. Before sleep, you walk on coral reefs of
deep orange, emerging through murmuring
inlet where current is heavily stocked with fish.
Any moment the sky may darken and the sea
spews billows in great ascent, and through the
narrow slit of the mist she may rise, when the
open earth, rumbling air, and sheer stone walls
of spray collide. She may walk to shore, peeling
free the briny coat, flesh molds over bone, the
moon churns gold on her tress. Then how will
you explain the way your thoughts slide beneath
the half-light and the ghosts of birds rasp your
voice in pained cackle--when the head knows
not what the heart speculates. You will need to
speak the language of the sea, of a midnight's
wail that breathes beneath the underbelly of the
words, one part air, the other part earth. And
maybe, just maybe, as her limbs morph back
under the waves, memory will carry the part of
speech where delicate shift in barometer will
remind her of your refrained whisper, and some-
where in the midst of liquid depths, the tracing
of your vanishing leaves itself on lime-rich shales.