Since infancy, since myself soft mollusk curled
tight to its floor, Sea’s voice my lullaby,
and the gulls’ cry, the wheeling gulls
in gale, sounding beached against upthrust,
wave upon cresting wave of stone,
salt reek alkali seeps in the low sloughs
and coulees, my prairie, tide-learned trough
and pitch and roll, my cradle, my bed,
thin carpet shortgrass clenched in gritty soil
above layered shales, secret in them ammonite
and oyster and the locked vertebrae of pliosaur,
coral, shark tooth, boney fishes. Glassy horse-tail reed
still grows in the rich muds and shallows
where the sheep come to drink, brackish water’s
fishy tide pool stink around fierce heron’s ankles,
my ancient, my ocean, I was born old inside her
winds that twisted me as a trunk of juniper, gnarled
and bent me, and still I stand, star flames dancing
phosphorescent about my head:
I have always spoken in tongues.