From: Incantation: Memory of Water

Tonight, a strand of my great-grandmother’s hair

sashes an amber beer bottle discarded by a tourist.

A white thread of my grandmother’s baptismal robe

is a bangle on a wrist of kelp

waving its arm on St. Phillip’s eastern coast.

The ocean does not hunger

but its mouths gape and hold, like errant flecks

of salt, my long-travelled molecules:

I am everywhere the water has been.

It is my skin, too, my great-grandmother washed

and scrubbed with smooth stones

until it gathered the softness of zinnia petals, the sun lust

of bougainvillea vining.

With her name, Christina Hayes,

I could comb through the birth records of her small country,

lift sun-gashed leaflets of fading ink

from archival folders.

But I crave my palm open in the ocean mouth

from which her children were fed,

the prosody of a wave

returning her extinguished pulse,

for a moment, to the blood she made.