Ghost peach press

For all of us who dread the dim light, who stare
at the stars for understanding, whose eyes adjust
  at dusk, our perfect mammal smallness

is a pressure. Yesterday, I screamed at my own
inconsequence. My guttural yell rifled like gunshots.
  It reached nothing, unlike the ocean’s

prompts, touching wherever they go. On tribal
islands, washerwomen scrub laundry on breakwater
  rocks. Some men canoe to an isthmus

for the best catch. And through spume-barrels,
a child stands on a board and ducks. Most people
  don’t question, but pay tributes to the sea’s

foam thudding their shores, the water’s high-tide
petticoats that sift all kinds of sky-sun-cloud-airplane
  reflections. I wish I could read those scribblings

on the surface or tonight’s half-moon that tugs at me.
Blue driftwood, striped with salt, piles itself onshore.
  And right now, sails of shadow—cumulonimbus

fleets, armadas of stars—move over all the fish and their
crazy calligraphy language. I look upward and spy the ink
  smudges of bat wings going everywhere. Nowhere.