from Poor & Carefree Strangers
The island tugs madrone & starfish on like a shirt,
stands naked later to be scrubbed down to its shale, rainbows of gray,
people hopping across it like sandfleas
3 a.m.
Riddling charm, riddling charm,
the moon drags its mineral light through my arm
I’m made of sexy vibrant running blood
DRIFTWOOD WALKING STICK, STRAW HAT, PANTS STRETCHED HIGH ACROSS A BELLY
7 a.m.
Two little yellow deciduous something or others
stir in the breeze,
the hammock too, empty but
moving like it’s alive, alive but
asleep. Peed
in the most private
shrub I could manage.
11 a.m.
Little crab buries itself in the
shell rubble of the tide pool.
Vituperation and longing, names
for constellations, the torturer’s
tenderness all fade to
outlines or nothings
on the island’s time:
weak croak of the passing eagle:
one Jay thinks, that’s all the song our
stupid country deserves, while
another Jay
obsesses as the ants do over
an eagle-leaving at tide-line, a long
bleached leaf-fine unidentifiable
bone.
Drifting Contours I Fill In
Dorian’s foot innocent of weight
& rough resisting earth repeats
the coils—floating sleek
silhouetted—of bull kelp spooled out
straight later by high tide
Gabe’s
Dalwhinnie 15-year the color of
dry (EXTREME FIRE HAZARD) grass the bottle
rests on
garbage bag bulging
like the abdomen of madame la vespa
sipping muddy water at the pump
soapy sunrise glow of the dishwater
princess from the next
shoreside site
twirls her scepter index-finger addressing her
invisible subjects
from her balustrade
of shale
2 p.m.
Big red rain-faded barn Ropy maroon-tipped At the winery someone
blackberries says of their friend (?)
with a silver Acura “All they do is take Ubers
small in the milking- Money’s one local and
stall invasive, our faded order Uber Eats!
American cash & bright
miles cards no
better
The blanket I’d hung over head and shoulders
to keep off the heat of the sun got hot
& the osprey
scre-e-e-e-e-eamed & dived, hit the water
toosh
& came up
empty in the hot dust dream of our day…
In the water’s beaten green-bronze-black
Stone: the old mud
folded & pressed, folded & pressed
its lichen leaven…
*
The rip-and-scamper fracas of tide pool,
abrading wave abrading wave abrading salty wave,
little indentations of the mink’s running feet…
One-eyed barnacle larva tumble
over rock already crowded with
barnacles like me with all these
great patches & no room on my clothes to sew them on.
*
Nature not a rest or respite but an answering
spirit, quick in fir and rainbow oil-gloss,
slow in tonguing back at the glacier.
Prayers like rolling one stone over another:
if I don’t bring
more of myself to my commitments
I’m going to freak out and quit them all.
Salt-poisoned cedar trees tipped into the bay, bark
bleached white: aqua top and black trackshorts
airdrying on a rock, leaving black
shadow-damp short-and-top-print selves below.
* 
What are an island’s virtues?
Some kind of im-
memorial stony
slow ache it makes over:
in bunches of
madrone, beetle-eaten
bark,
the unflagging goodwill of
wavework,
shale gapping far
enough for ants who
scavenge this tide’s left-
over
seabladder,
anemone shred,
red vivid smash
of crab?…
Tired of the Self I Meet in the Broom Grass’s Mirror
This bare buzzing meadow is nice
but it returns to myself only myself
& its kind of wild half-asleep subjectivity
that measures its thirst out
in months & its sex in fragile
furry once-a-year upthrusts : I can’t imagine it growing
green though I figure it must : the grass and I have
only so much we can
say to each other : 20 feet away
in shade
there’s such a thing as
my friends too with foreign-feeling griefs & satis-
factions outside (say) their theater of vibration
minerals muddy water & a blooming that’s
on the very edge of death—
IN JULY SUN IN BLACK PANTS
Simmer-shadow-splash of the gas stove’s flame
cast in continuous motion
onto the bench: you hold
too hard onto an old intimacy with
no life but the life of story
at the cost of really feeling
the love like an unbroken wave
bearing you: you make yourself immovable.
THE LAST NORMAL DAY WAS IN THE PAST
SO WHY ARE WE GOING CAMPING?
11 p.m.
Mars shaken to pieces on the water:
the fire’s orange reflection on the underside of the leaves
Jay Aquinas Thompson is a poet, essayist, and teacher with recent or forthcoming work in Pacifica Literary Review, Passages North, Jubilat, Tammy, COAST | NoCOAST, Full Stop, and Poetry Northwest, where they’re a contributing editor. They’ve been awarded grants and fellowships from the Community of Writers, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and King County 4Culture. They live with their child in Washington state, where they teach creative writing to incarcerated women.