To Where Before the Sea?
Here we are still
adrift,
taken by this most ancient of veins,
carried humbly and silently
along on the atlas shoulders of the same waters
that drifted in the breaths of Jesus, stuck
to the wings of insects in prehistory, and
steamed from the first cloth applied to a fevered forehead.
We, small creatures, keep notice—
we listen for miles to the static of energy
as it passes from one form to another,
to the heat that stores in our cheeks
and abandons our fingertips and knees.
There is never silence and we are grateful
for the company.
And in the morning we will wake to slow rain
freckling the river’s infantile face,
scrambling the reflections of a cool sheet of sky
that has been thrown by the winds over the basin.
We are surrounded now.
We are peculiar spots of warmth
shivering between two worlds of water
continuously shuffling between each other
a touchable, tasteable proof of the eternal.
It’s odd that we don’t doubt the current, we
who have become so humanly accustomed to control, trust
its decidedly relentless direction.We are taken
willingly but with an uneasiness that keeps our pleads for mercy
close to the sensitive ends of our tongues.
And when this river splits
or finds its own death at the sea,
I will go with you onto the beach
and watch the glory of a stoic unknown
approach to bring us, trembling and smiling,
to face our days to come.
And maybe by then, I will have sung
to you this song that I have ever struggled
to bring out of the one part of myself that I
could never control. Maybe by then
we will know where we have truly spent our years and
the absolute calm the river feels
before it gets to where it’s going,
as we will always find ourselves,
until the moment we become part
of the unfathomable sea,
still adrift.
