Les Solitaires

You console yourself with the words of the wind on the shore where you await my own words, as if they were coconuts-of-the-sea; “Mauritius, Mauritius,” the palms breathe. One day I caught a guano boat bound for the Cargados, drunk on the color of the bluff sail, sleepy with my head on the cool thigh of twilight, four fingers dragging through the wine shoals purpling the bow. Morning had the scent of a Renoir, and chuffing shoreward, fresh breezes ferried sea foam off crab-gripped banks, white as pink. I found your poems there, stowed in a triton shell, thin scrolls for the ghost crabs. It was noon all day, it seemed, till sundown, when some green flocks beat westward out of sight.