At the lowest of tides
we go walking
through the low tide
mansions, surfaced,
stairways roughed with
salt, barnacles,
the banisters salt-cured
white. We roam
barefoot in muslin dresses
and do not
speak, relieved a few hours
from our names,
from children waking, from
closets bowed
with color, from the drone
of machines
that do our bidding. Our eyes
close beneath
the sun-drenched pergola,
twisted thick
with petrified vines of wisteria.
We turn in slow
circles through the grand ballroom,
baked clean
of gold and varnish, a wreck
of rusted
cello stands washed in
the corner.
Crystal chandeliers, clouded
to sea glass
become stone. Wallpaper dissolved,
walls encrusted
with the raw white lace
of the sea.
Dry opal fish scales eddy
in our wake.
We always reconvene
on the widow’s walk,
littered with lost anchors.
From there,
we witness the low tide
deepening,
another mansion appearing,
alive, like
white coral, farther down
the long drift
of strand. We will make
our way there,
across the burning noon sand,
to each mansion,
where we own nothing, and
love no one,
cloistered by the tides
in these convents
of the desert
and of the deep.