What to reach for

Novucia

We snake in and out of the coastline, stitching
a templated pattern where the road retracts under
clouds kept gray with a sense of mornings more
ancient than this one might strive to be.

For this poem’s purpose, we are as old as it is,
clever as otters at bask in unobserved inlets
hidden by a blue lack of asphalt, perfect as
things are without so little as a human gaze.



Try to hold the million days it took to bring us
here, eons without a thought of who we might
come to be, red and black skies, fleshmass washed
up on dead beaches, the first genesis of flowering.

Above the deep sandbeat you take my hand,
reminding me of what to reach for, what never to
hold too tightly lest we surrender bones, give over
to what pressures are required to build a tomorrow.

Joseph Gallo
November 17, 2014