What does the sea want, my clothes, my keys, my face?

This is the mind's Sargasso,

Expansive as Kansas flatlands, the big dead place.

The weeds stir, they make promises; I'm light as a shell.

Immobile, the sea bottom

Glints at my emptiness with ship's tackle, jewels,

Railway tickets, photographs: the blue-eyed platoons

Grin up from their doomed jungles.

I am left with nothing to hold, nothing to do

But imagine those horses the Spaniards abandoned here:

At night I have seen them rise

To graze the glassy prairie and whinny their fear.

Anxious, disconsolate,

They sniff for a wind. Sour water drips down their tails.

Ghost horses, I am like you: when the gray line of a sail

Threads the horizon, my heart strains forward too:

Heavy with salt, the blood

Leans like a tide, but has no place to go.