This sea has sulked so long it has forgotten wetness.
Slumped in its bed, it is too weary to raise a wave
or a few fish. There is nothing to be done with it.

It has swallowed its tears and become parched by the salt,
halfway to desert already, the water gluey.
It will seek out your eyes, or a cut, with its Greek fire.

They call it dead but it is swaddled in fevered sleep.
Sometimes it dreams itself full of blood, or remembers
what it was like to be fished and, convulsing itself,

coughs up a gob of sticky black the size of a horse.
The beach is smirched with them. Throw anything into it,
a lamp, a lump of iron, a feather, a felon,

and you only add to its confusion. It gulps down
a feather or an unlit lamp, but iron will float,
and flame floats beside it. The sea will have none of them,

and you must drown your chained man elsewhere: it spits him out.
Sodom was salted down here, and Lot’s wife crystallized.
Now nothing grows on the shore but apples stuffed with ash.