NATURE Poem: Slaughter Beach, by Merci Lyons-Cox

I.

People live longer near the water, he says,
inviting the collapse of the wave to break

open something clogged and congealed—
a jellyfish jealousy flushing into a great sinkhole.

He swallows his sun-fried pride and feels
the tide coaxing the fluidity of his manhood

as boundary bleeds into the long flash of
sunset flush, the blushing boil of being unnamed,

uncalled, unmade, moored, and,
more to the point, bound to lap at the body

by which he is held alo. It is nighttime on
Slaughter Beach.

Cloak of the eyes closed proves a portal to
bodily evaporation, a holy perpetuity,

an acceptance of, whatever, everything,
nothing, who cares, who can care when

you can feel nothing but the everything
of yourself, a fleck on the continental shelf,

at the mercy of this great mother and all
of her gruesome glories made sharpened

and spineless and shaped to survive
the womb of the ocean.

The ocean is our greatest ancestor, he thinks,
as he opens his eyes to the Slaughter Beach

sky and feels the sudden measure of his brevity
equidistant to the distance of the stars,

and suddenly he cares about everything,
every single thing that exists now and never,

before and beyond and outward and into,
as above so below the porous crust

of the earth’s sun-warmed epidermis,
determined to hold the whole inside

of his sun-kissed skin shell so he is
filled up and filled out and bursting.

II.

People live longer near the water, he says, and
I did not question, despite detecting the growing

groan of a grounded flock celebrating the prizes
of the tide, knowing that splayed in their jubilee

lay the bones of a stoned man who last night lied down
under a night sky lit like light through a punctured pelt,

and when the sun rose, his lying had become laying,
just as objects do not lie but lay.

The squawking gawks of the gulls grew aroused
as we rounded the slope of a dune and

drew nearer. A weather-shorn shore stretched,
speckled with the flickering of the feast

as each head in the sea of gulls ducked and
bobbed and shucked from their shells

the cursed crustraceans, beached, doomed to beak
or to bake. It is suppertime on Slaughter Beach