My fingernails scrape lava stones,

loosen dust.

Back one hundred years and out to sea,

drowned ones stir in their kelp beds.

Looking for the other world

I find a fissure in the earth that leads

to where the sea tosses its wet creatures,

their lungs exhaling.

The ocean spreads dark and cold beneath the night,

reaches with every wave

for drops of light shed by the moon,

a radiance where unfathomed fish glow.

Musty air and a ghost rattle through banana leaves

you rise up, bones of family architecture, luminous.

A woman without soil, you carved roots

from stones of  the island.

Into the Azorean sea you dive.

The splash of your body, and I jump,

scattering stars, to pull towards you.

Where ocean and sky meet, you vanish.

Your memory, the afterlife dissolving

all that salt

seeping back into the sea

an ocean mist without end.

I hold my breath, hear the heartbeat of waves,

feel the ocean of my blood.

My body takes pleasure in forgetting gravity,

the need for breathing on my own.

I ask God to throw me a line.

Floating to the shore I feel the pull of the universe

slow everything down, to where heaven pulls the earth

into its arms.