I need to bleed my orange dome outsiderness.
Then words on paper will mean what they should.
Words about the wound.

It’s a journey
and Bhanu has a head start, her head
always being chartreuse yarn
and the cottony inner sticks
birds use to carpet love nests.
Her workshop will be in the anima,
not this classroom on a former military base.

She pours us out and we seep around campus.
I choose the beach because I’ve been avoiding
its candor. Not knowing a horse, I walk.

The Quimper Peninsula and I
are surrounded by the gossip
of this minute’s wave;
this hour’s sand.
In the ballet, I am today’s grit,
indistinguishable and holy.

Flotsam in a notebook for Bhanu:

grasses leaning and lifting in a Gene Kelly chorus line;
the leapfrogging of parents and children,
parents who were children, sharing wonder
with river otter families;
driftwood that looks like an alligator,
another is like a horse head, leaning ready.
Will there be a starting gun,
or will we all just know?

Jetsam, when will the fire stop following me?

Orange atmosphere—the burning
of nearby towns in the edge
of my perpetual eye. The color
of half thinking of escape, the color
of half thinking, half being grit
watching the surf.