Tuesday Poem: Revenant

When they pulled me from the water

I had scarcely finished breathing

My fingernails dripped blood and sand

My slack-jawed face had turned the blue of ocean

They pushed and pulled my heart to action

I stumbled from the cooling sand

and ate the proferred wafer

All along my neck and arms

the hair stood up in terror

I knew you would see nothing

My eyes still blink

my lips still speak my

feet still strike the pavement

We laugh and smile

and in your speech I

hear the kelp pods cracking

But in the moonless dark of night

avoid the outer windows

I walk beneath the summer rain

and see the green mouth closing

In my wake the crusted salt

dissolves upon the grass blades

Credit note: "Revenant" was published in my first poetry collection, Boat People (2002).

Tim says: I tried this idea - a fantasy/horror transfiguration of the time I nearly drowned in 1989 - as both a short story and a poem. I never got anywhere much with the story, but this poem made it into my first collection. If I was writing it now, there are some things I would do differently, but I like the lurching rhythm that gets going for a while in the third stanza.

The Tuesday Poem: Is particularly worth checking out at the moment, as the jazz poem the Tuesday Poets are collectively writing for the third anniversary of the Tuesday poem is growing vaster than empires, and a good deal quicker.