By Rin Norte
A sestina
The wasp hovers in small repetitive vectors over the sand
like a helicopter locating casualties in the sea.
It settles, digs with front feet, a wave
of grains in its wake, new life
deposited. Half-buried, it walks backwards into the sun
takes off, lands again, sets to work shovelling the sand’s skin.
Your fingers are trailing the fine hairs on my sacral skin.
Laid flat, I can hear the grinding of displaced sand
as your body shifts away, my sun.
My lost tongue catches a trickle above my lip; tasting sea.
It’s the fourth or fifth day of taking account of our life.
What we’re deciding has felled me like the drag of a wave.
Baby hairs coursing the low spine in a blonde wave
had bristled at the stroke of your hand on skin
as we’d weighed the prospect of having each other for life;
foresaw a future built on sand.
I can find each breath only from the template of the sea.
Overexposed, there’s nothing between me and the sun.
Keeping her hat and clothes on against the sun,
turning the cover of her book back on itself like a wave,
a grandmother sits in her chair between our towels and the sea—
There will be more ballast shed before your skin is like my skin.
Every worn stone and stored pearl piles into aggregate; sand—
too close, emitting her understanding of life.
Now you’re swimming from our shared life,
face pained at the sun,
as I stand and gasp at the scald of the sand
and run into the heavy collapse of one more breaking wave.
I gasp again when the tide meets my belly skin,
surpassing my plimsoll line for grief as I enter undersea.
Borrowing buoyancy from the sea
you fit your arms around to hold me up, a lifeguard, and nothing unknown or unwanted meets my skin.
Joined in the water, chin on shoulder, alternately facing the sun
until you’re lifted off by an outgoing wave
and I can’t put my feet down here—bed of rocks below, not sand.
Dispersed by the sea after rising, for a time, from the sun’s
force that forms life; as energy moving through water forms waves.
Slipped from each other’s skin, our glass drops its last grain of sand.