Donald Zirilli

Liquid Tiara Diaries

 

1.
Today the sea is full of ants—
paisleyed by the rising tide,
their restless carapaces danced

to death, enswirled.
…………………………..We let them guide
our steps along this water’s edge,
we let their float dissolve our stride.

Tiny weightless husks, we trudge
no more, but drift through hollow conch
and brine—wet sand the crumbling bridge

to our new home.

2.
………………………….But there are roses
in the dunes. We try to eat them—
their pink too bitter, brittle. Though

this morn, found cropped to thorn and stem
by more nocturnal appetites,
we start to sing their requiem

—when scavengers by dawn’s first light
divert us to the beach for feasts
far stranger: water logged and white,

a horde of little larval meats
a thousand naked cloves of spice,
of shipwrecked garlic.
………………………………On our knees

we gather and devour.

3.
………………………………Some bamboo.
Ten yards of tangled copper wire.
A wig. An axe. A rubber shoe.

From sea dark and dune fire,
from the cast-off manna of wave and shore
we harvest all that we require—

those final facts we can’t ignore
so quickly gone from wrack to ruin,
bleached bone our armature.

You query the silver of bent spoons,
while I poise plastic children’s toys
like bits of color on the tombs

of those the littoral destroys.
The rusted fuselage. The plovers
burnt within their nests.
…………………………………Like buoys

all things signal now.

4.
…………………………….The zone
of sand expands. Each night is filled
with grinding, a disintegrating drone.

By daylight there’s another hill
between us and the shore. We sleep
now near the waves—though never still,

at least we see them move.

5.
……………………………………….The screams,
and then the rain of violet ash—.
At first we ran.
………………………Those last machines

still cauterize our dreams with lash
and lesion, razor, bleaching fire.
We wake to cinders as they crash

right through the pale dull scar
we have become—we who’ve ceased to flee.
The flames have died.
……………………………….None came this far

who would not hear, who could not see
how, on this peeled and naked strand,
the only thing remaining was to be

as loosely littered as this land
that flushed us toward the sea.

6.
………………………………………….At dawn,
our ankles licked with salt, we wake
to tidal marks of jellied spawn,

a crisp yet viscous roe which breaks
apart when blistered by the sun
into a thousand lucent flakes,

a thousand perfect discs, each one
a tasteless cipher to our senses—
dissolved by air, but not by tongue,

half-durable, and half-defenseless.
Half-starved, we tear them with our teeth:
this school of orphaned contact lenses,

the empty eyes of those bequeathed
the blindness of the surge.