on swallowing the sea

This is still in the habitable range, though too pronounced of heat and drought to last all that much longer. This is still carried water, though the reservoir doesn’t show it. We move in haste across an estimation of our terrain, thoughts deep beneath the exhibition of turns and signs, threatened and threatening by tradition and design. We are known by knives and appetites, names and shadows always along for the ride. Carried along by tides and currents, dragged lucid and magnetic, the cumbersome storm and the overhead bag. Still you seethe and open wide, wave after endless wave. It was only ever more, despite the grandiosity and the high hatting, beyond all capacity you can claim. So it makes you a liar, and a dead one at that. So it becomes a poem, or at least an epitaph.

There are the ones with a pocketful of rocks. There are the ones drowning drunk on the moon. The stories passed around the fire, the verses added to the song, we stay up late just to keen and long. Tales told to elude confession, tales told to explain the stars, there in the details of the day and the shaping of the stones. The long path up the hill, the road all slope and bend, the structure there yet unseen in the foundation of the forest. The dimming dream, the brimming day, the way a whim becomes a way. The symbols and the stitching, the trail burning as you enter metaphor. The wants and the whereabouts, all the murdered darlings that make up the work of the heart. Nothing to follow but the moon and the shore.

There are the details of the day and the form of the story, Seven Brothers or Billy Goats Gruff, swallowing the ocean or clobbering the boorish troll. There is the prescient power, there is the surrender to the incomprehensible. This work of words, this unending flood, time comes thundering down and we tumble on. The depths and the delving, this cycle of the story, this engine of the moments drumming down. The sky stills below your belly, the earth an urgency in your bones, your heart repeating “the tide, the tide.” The etchings along the shortcut through the happenstance, this tale composed of anticipation and negative space, the restless tongue gently cradling the flavor of saying it aloud. It is more than and I am a morsel trailing salt and grease. The ambivalence of heaven left breathing, leaving words as gravity trails off into the past. Leaving words, waiting for someone to speak.