Tonight the rain
cuts horizontal, trees
trapped, beating in its wires.

To put word by word
is no less than to make
things whole: this storm, next

to stillness. A girl
(it is Amelia-Anne) curls
under a green parasol; her hands

smolder like wrack
under her spread of salty
hair (which Nanny or Granny,

brick-fisted, combs).
The sea is not sea but is
a stretch of light where wading

shrimpers bob and
a sail is a stilled fin
and the slants of smoke might

well mean volcanoes.
Her empty long-legged
bathing-suit and her bunched-up

skirt are two black
laps catching what the sun
drops, and under one she lifts

her bony white
itchy-stockinged knees
into my storm. That it is fire

that gropes up
from her boots, up the
sharp calves, down to the hips

over the body with
its narrow rack of ribs,
makes it no different cataclysm.

Amelia-Anne, you
are not a child; no more
am I. I am placing these words

tonight, saying
we come together, aging
into a seasonlessness of our making:

my roof-pitch rips,
cold strands bleed on my
sill, but I taste the sand-grains

on my splitting
lip, and you (while the
comb tugs cruel) thrust your tongue

out—to the swivel
of hail that in silent
weight drives down on your teeth.