Seashell

The washed bone of your spine
curls fetal, it is sun streaked – a shingle
of pail toenail, egg hip. Cream of crusts,
of ends, of palms.

You sleep, displaced, in dry meditation.
Your pulse is a memory of the tide, the bloated
belly of its swell, the soft pull like seaweed
round an ankle. How the water moved without direction,
turned you wet vagabond.

Your arms bend away in a bow,
low, in brown – the eldest orange, father
of sunset, born burnt. Like you,
it once traveled to blue.