Pleasure and its wispy finger 
curling over decades

like the shared shade of pale objects:
lantern, fan, and wall. Sometimes

I see my young friends elderly, 
smaller in their skin 

for harbor minutes
when to remember 

to fill the boat with kindness 
papers the throat like a thick stripe 

of fire to my breast. Blush wind. 
I cut them loose, in a saying 

kept unsaid. Again, again 
this rock like the head of a siren

broken over by waves. 
The approximate chapter of the water 

is somewhere in the middle so we may stay 
a little longer, a little longer.