Raw-faced on the cliff-top
with the wind thrashing at their skirts
the washerwomen stop their gab
as he strides through the dazzle
of pegged sheets that bulge and crack
between green and blue. Indubitably
a gentleman, he ducks his silk hat
under the clotheslines and descends,
black caped, to the shore—
yellow rock slashed with gray;
the wet stones tilt and knock
beneath his patent boots.

We had chained her
hooked through the armpits
to a rail in the roof, and when
we paunched her the bucket yielded up
ropes of moonstone, opal, amethyst.

Staggering among the pools,
he brandishes his cane in the dumb-
founding wet wind, its wickedly-clawed
ivory grip fixed with chased
silver to the ebony stem. The sea floor
thrusts its weedy humps
up through the water's sag.

I think of her sometimes
(her eyes lucent and softly-fringed
like a gazelle's) perched
on the edge of her chair, laughing,
leaning back, clasping her knee—a glimpse
of her cambric drawers. What, one might ask,
did each of us feel
afterwards, filching a souvenir,
a ring, a handkerchief, a bar of soap?
When they had carried her away,
I caught him in her room,
at the foot of her bed,
a stocking pressed to his mouth.

Deaf now to her ageless voice,
I stand in the flapping bed-linen
above the sea and watch him curse the waves,
sharing his guilt, his loss