The tarantula rattling at the lily-s foot
Across the feet of the dead, laid in white sand
Near the coral beach-nor zigzag fiddle crabs
Side-stilting from the path (that shift, subvert
And anagrammatize your name)-No, nothing here
Below the palsy that one eucalyptus lifts
In wrinkled shadows-mourns.

And yet suppose
I count these nacreous frames of tropic death,
Brutal necklaces of shells around each grave
Squared off so carefully. Then

To the white sand I may speak a name, fertile
Albeit in a stranger tongue. Tree names, flower names
Deliberate, gainsay death-s brittle crypt. Meanwhile
The wind that knots itself in one great death-
Coils and withdraws. So syllables want breath.

But where is the Captain of this doubloon isle
Without a turnstile? Who but catchword crabs
Patrols the dry groins of the underbrush?
What man, or What
Is Commissioner of mildew throughout the ambushed senses?
His Carib mathematics web the eyes- baked lenses!

Under the poinciana, of a noon or afternoon
Let fiery blossoms clot the light, render my ghost
Sieved upward, white and black along the air
Until it meets the blue-s comedian host.

Let not the pilgrim see himself again
For slow evisceration bound like those huge terrapin
Each daybreak on the wharf, their brine-caked eyes;
-Spiked, overturned; such thunder in their strain!
And clenched beaks coughing for the surge again!

Slagged of the hurricane-I, cast within its flow,
Congeal by afternoons here, satin and vacant.
You have given me the shell, Satan,-carbonic amulet
Sere of the sun exploded in the sea.