Philip Emery: ‘Last Poem as Myself’

Last Poem as Myself
“It was his last afternoon as himself”
—W.H. Auden

From here the paths
from past to now
are clear and there are
points I know which lead
to the other universe
of song, surprise,
salt spray and possibility.

The flush and flow of tide,
the reaming of fissures,
the roll of shell and sand and heat and cold
will wear down memory
until we are scoured to nothing
or thrown up like flayed
and filigreed fish food
for forensic scientists
to fillet, probe and gut.

For the moment though
I use this terrain, the line between
sea and sand as a point to
map me, back and forward.
A fixed compass foot
between gibber desert
and the submarine.

You and me,
we float and pulse a fathom down,
Our piscine eyes are empty white.
In tidal swells we roll and bump
and more than once we crash together
and send the other spinning slow
through green striation
to bounce off the sandy bottom,
sightless
For the rhythm
of the undersea to claim.

Philip Emery