Urchin to Follow

I’m sending you this urchin for a reason, Smoke.
—“Echinoidea Freddy,” Mike Chasar

Because it is hollow, and its five parts compose
a whole that greens, transposed to garden,
once exposed to swampy air. Because it claims
its wishbones, five matched ramparts
grown round tongues of water, now of air,

each calling still to fortify
the walls of shell, lest they collapse
into the larger green. The urchin
a communal singularity, a solipsistic whole
whose diversified nerves dream the whole story,

down to the ocean’s bones. I ride out
each green interval as a sailing rajah’s
overboard thief, occupy the hollow beat
between wave and wave, leaf and leaf,
sink in the greening of my earliest wishes,

and wait to be cured of my errors.
Each wish composed of many parts.