Down by the shoreline the wishes are teeth
and then they are waves the way winds are

pushing kites through blue as a nothing
and then pushing out of paired lungs the word

blue, the word nothing. God, I have nothing
to say to you. It is the ocean that’s made of enough

depth to contain you. Take my instead
instead. Take the stillness of this time

in which I sit, slow-breathed. Take the fear
of stillness from my hands. I wave and I

cannot imagine the waves are waving back.
I can’t imagine the gesture as brutal or

beautiful, I can’t imagine any of the objects
of this gut-gloried earth as anything close

to what I mean by hello or goodbye, what
I mean by anything except the fact of my fear

that at the end of my ending opens the throat
of a story I won’t understand as my own.