Summer Midnight

A man wakes in a hotel room
In an unfamiliar time zone. He has all his memory

and yet he carries nothing with him from that time.
Like the new summer from the spring he is all effect and no cause.

Outside in the dark he walks as if on the floor of a great sea.
But the ground plants have sucked all the water from the place

And have taken on a strange bristly beauty as if floating upwards.
Opening his mouth to say a name the word dries on his tongue.

One hundred and eleven degrees: three above auspicious.
Of the river his lover grew up alongside and the low-tide’s waves

Of the bay he knew as a child he hears nothing. But he hears
a message as when a great wave has washed over you

And floating in the foam you find a scrawled message
from the past forecasting that a wave is about to crash.

The hotel swallows the moon like a horizon.
One lizard on a row of stones.