the fracture of the sea (vent mestral)

on the lunar rocks    I walk    the rocks where I no longer have you taken

by the wind      the sea a ghost around my cheeks to warm me against this loss 

of sediment    memory     the quarry fields so empty of the rock    after all just a composite

of detrital grains    coral, shells, pellets, dolomite fragments    I walk    my feet eaten by windholes

I could’ve withstood the pressure of the nails like a fakir grandad said      before swallowing 

the sea which has changed appearance since    shifting its frustration onto the vulnerable

calcarenites

                                                                 were we split apart by our childhoods like rocks are

split by centuries of wind    dunes fossilised    their sand cemented before it can become itself

its self made more impossible by the mechanical erosion of this island

no longer alone and happy in the middle of the ocean    the solid sea wind almost like brine

dripping silently into the shore’s uneven colander    the sound of construction works 

a persistent echo            

                                                 stone pines (Pinus pinea)    so common in my childhood    

seem rare from the green distance of exile growing precariously on hollow rocks    the air 

that fills them fills my dreams which keep me awake no longer on your bed and almost sated 

of the memory of the island as it was             as it is                denuded 

speedily with greed and all the sadder in its crowded nudity    sated of the memory

of home    of blau marí and sand brown and the sound of waves breaking into us daily

To Barcelona

tangential into the world

winds ravish generationally

sights I thought permanent

today I travelled home

to see Saharan dust tint

the air ochre-orange

kinder than the growing 

intimacy of smog          

                              I left

to make a new home

in the silence of change

where frost refracts light

unfamiliarly

coming to feel almost foreign

in the warm light

of our lives as children 

I’d never experienced home

sickness more acutely:

flying into colours moving

until they touch memory