Now your mother is the Lord of Death. 
Her ash is affluent and fugitive. She is where 
tears spool their nylon line 

over the sand where she combed and combed, 
where she launched her messages to the gods 
of cold salt and cod, the gods of drunken 

fly fishermen, the gods face down 
in the sand bar, gods like flies fixed in baby oil, 
gods spooned into greenhead sandwiches. 

I am the Lord of Death in small riptides, she says, my forearms
anointed by girls from the Catholic camp backstroking 
every day regardless of the weather, 

shivering in their regulation white rubber caps,
I am the chapped sex in the unsoundproofed 
bedrooms partitioned by knotty pine. 

I am the diaper wars. I am the hands stained 
with blueberry, dotted with butter, crimped 
under the painted flour tins. I am the little smells 

in the broom closet, the whiffs of old baby 
trapped in decades of hot summer sun,
the attic where chilled children lie naked 

and warm their bones after all day in cold
salt water, I am the sand bucket with blue stars, 
I am Sunday morning before the religion 

of the Portuguese, the children with their quarters 
for grapes from the Italian fruit peddler. I am water 
so cold that ankles have forgotten shins. 

Look at the skate cases, she orders you, 
and the skate tails, and the jellyfish 
like a capitol whose dome has turned translucent, 

the fish eggs like a bad wig, the fish eggs in their long 
sheaf-like cases fringing the sand bars, in the targets 
of the sunstroke, of rabid gulls who bit the business

partner’s girl. Smell the panic in the crotch, 
she commands, touch the band-aids impressed 
into service by the aftermath of champagne line 

devotions, the lecherous diddlers importuning 
unconscious virgins, fingering the virgins 
in the back seat of the car. 

I am the morning after the Holy Cross reunion, 
setting out your plaid bathing suits on the beds, 
the wind picking its ways between the dunes, 

the sweet clean smell of scoured sand and dune grass 
scribing hourglass etchings. 
I am the flurries of regret shaved 

into flakes by razor clams over old shipwrecks, 
the shipwrecked bosuns of the moon jingling 
their ghostly chimes, their pirate reverb, the shipwreck 

stripped by the alcohol brigades on the business retreat 
in the era of goldenrod, I am the half-burned 
lobster shell in the incinerator ash you must bury 

every weekend, the wet garbage left 
to breed maggots, the maggots in the turkey
carcass when I am not there 

to remind you that to suffer is to stand still.

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