Jhani Randhawa: SQUALL (excerpt from Pacific Gothic)

We once wrote each other letters
               from stone littered beaches
               newly eroding, from fog, from tropics

One of these letters arrived in a torso-sized
               envelope, water-stained and wrinkled—
               it was slipped through a gap between
               the door and its frame

It was a letter of abstraction

Inside, my friend rendered in a night-flash
               a photograph, and on its emptied reverse,
               some words to cut his shadow from sand—

                              I do not love
               music, sound, sea, surf and surfacing;
               O sea, open, I am           there, them, then—

I do not remember the rest now;
               to be subsumed, a liquid subject
               to depart from love, to depart from subject—

In dredging the body for its memories,
there was also what Aggie said, in her transcription:

                              We believe that where contour-swept slopes
                              are steep, the resulting intensification
                              of near-bottom velocities prevents

                              healing

                              slope

                              processes

As an ocean ages, plural god
shuttle of light and languages
as ocean is thick
               on an atmosphere cupped snow,
               born of glacier
I exit into dream                of tsunami frozen in place
                                            of settlement, of permutation

               zero. squall
                                            one. shape the limit
               two. find the road and the vertical drop
               three. refute then be refuge
                              four. the body dissolves
               five. consciousness as ripple