Sitting on a Desk Together at SMU, 1982

Sandra McPherson

A girl moaning: I don’t

understand

“Wave.”

You said, Maybe

you should try

selected whitecaps.

I saw, on a flight

to Honolulu, plane-shadow

on whitecaps.

My eye tried them.

Yours could, in its sleep.

Others needn’t think of them

as waves

but as scratches

in the furniture,

light wood under stain.

Obscurity stains almost the whole

half-globe,

hemisphere. The wave

was running at something, a sea-wall,

a boundary that even as fallacy hurt

its nose, forehead. It left

bits of horn on the beach.

And you want that girl to pick them up?

There’s a bird crowd beachcombing.

Humans love

going to fragments —

it’s Greek.

Pocket the pieces, some too small

to fetishize but not to single out

from the grand

current of forgetting.

There’s something unclear for us each:

start perhaps with Cynddelw,

a person of long gentle thinking

the color of breaking day on a deserted sea;

or when it deserts its own, you’ll find

a boot — rust and salt leather

to give back, or dance in;

or should you take the liberty to trespass in the middle of that sea,

re-reckon — men lower nets,

greedy unconscious desecrating a grave;

or you’ll start muttering to remains of springy clams,

their umbones junked rainbows joined by tar,

and make thin sense of what you collect.

Faced with bounty of krill,

filter less with cerebrum

than baleen.

It’s what comes through the foam.

Here’s the take-home:

An octopus wears my wallet now.