Don't shower yet. I mean it.
All day the sea had you
and gave you back to me like this —
the salt drying white on your shoulders
in the shape of every wave,
your hair stiff with it,
a little sand still in the hollow behind your ear
where I am going to look for it
with my mouth.
The towel is red and ugly and from a petrol station.
Lie down on it anyway.
The light is doing that thing it only does here,
in September, at seven,
when everything turns the colour of honey left in the sun
and even the goats on the hill look holy.
Let me taste the day off you.
Start here — the shoulder, where you burned.
Here, the inside of the wrist, where the sea sat longest.
The small of your back, which you didn't reach with the cream,
which I watched you not reach,
which I have been thinking about since noon.
You are saltier than the bread
my grandmother made with seawater during the war.
You are saltier than tears, than olives,
than the jokes my brother tells after midnight.
And when I have it all,
every grain, every white map of every wave,
then — yes —
then we can go in,
and stand under the bad shower with the cold pressure,
and let the fresh water
wash the sea away
and leave only
us.
