This way before you
A Thousand Strokes
For Marlene
And your back becomes a pained temple of devotion.
Pilgrims and acolytes move through bloodmuscle to
place their worships in a thousand flickers, a thousand
prayer wheels, a thousand bells sounding serpiginous
ache to tremble through your limbs. This is what the sea
does to you when you set out for her skyworn margins.
As each miracle exacts its riftless fee, so does salt
pull tears in small fathoms from your abyssal flesh.
You will not rewrite history this day as you are given
what shallow conquers are afforded you and that will be
that. Note this silently, with grace if you must, and let
pressurous hands trace miles left vanished in whalefoam.
Soon you will come to know that a paddle is not
something to stab oceans with again and again in
spent effort to arrive at a place unreachable, but rather
what stirs deep in the nautilus of a heart you share
with leviathan, seafarer, siphonophore, and ray, with
every other thing that has come this way before you.
Joseph Gallo
July 28, 2009
post-time 12:39 PM
2 Comments:
Wonderful, Joseph. After reading it three times without stopping, I feel like I am surfacing, reluctantly. Yep, the poor dry world is still here. Pity.
Without that poor dry world, my friend, where would we stand to drown in a thousand imagined oceans?
Thanks for your comment.
You always have some view few, if any, ever consider.
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