La Mina

Her fleeing spirit catches
on rocks on the empty shore;
on seaweed strung
around ankles coarse
with stubble, fishing lures
rusted and washed up are
reborn - a tent pitched, tides surfed,
ties torn.

And sunning on a rock outcrop
with birds dead and alive
she feels like the last woman,
last mermaid beyond sexual reproach,
without shame or pride or pair
of self-reproving eyes or smell, or taste,
or noise.

She fashions a fence of stones,
sits inside,
untouchably watching
mussel nets rake the surface,
dark black buoys and orange buoys
and duck-diving birds scatter in the vapours;
limp nets pulled in, dripping, piled
at the stern of little wooden boats.
She imagines the noise of them piling.

Desperate to piss,
she clenches her buttocks, ties
and reties her hair to distraction,
walks laps of the twilit beach;
plunges chest-deep
into water grey with silt
but cannot go, cannot abnegate
the perfect finishings of her family,
cannot stop thinking of her dad.

Build a stone wall then,
a box, an outhouse, a hollow
cairn homage to the human anatomy,
build pretty diversions with shattered brown glass-

red-eyed Inca birds place her,
without them she is nowhere;
she wishes they would fly back to Ballestas.