Drifting

"It is also good to sense

The wind die

and the boat move gravely

without it."

Approaching Prayer

by J. Dickey

A moment tries to come in

Through the windows, when one must go

Beyond what there is in the room, 

But it must come straight and down.

Lord, it is time, 

And I must get up and start

To circle through my father's empty house

...

Something goes through me

Like an accident, a

negligent glance, 

Like the explosion of a star

...

Vertebrae -- a body's exhibit

What is this vertebrae doing, gone missing?  It should be inside someone, not outside someone, sitting on a table like a little amoeba-sculpture, looking like bleached driftwood, hollow as a flute with spaces big enough for a finger, a spiky St Marks ring made of opaque glass or dried sea sponge.  I am holding it on my pinkie finger, wearing someone else's bone on my bones, a bangle, an accessory, it must have been more than an accessory to somebody, it must have been essential.

What happens when a vertebrae goes missing inside a body?  I am thinking of my own vertebrae , nestled in my lower back, that slipped one day, oozing out disc fluid like a jelly donut.  Maybe the vertebrae was knocking around loose like this one, an over-cracked agitated knuckle.  Forgotten until misplaced, swelling flesh and hitting nerves, lighting them up with electricity - spark plugs, a vertebrae is a spark plug.

Or a little home for something very small.  Its curves are beautiful and seem to make sense.  I imagine it a shrunken home by the sea with fluid waves in its walls, a home for other things that need homes - like disc jelly or sea weed or nomads looking to nestle for the night.

water

searching daylight for a face.

closing my eyes

and hearing my heart

soon it comes

the calm beginning 

of some kind of 

home

simple.

i run ahead of myself

and into a little house of soul

who is it?

which way out is the sea?

lighted in a new shape

the sand

yes.  it is dark

and a young body is in the waves

turning over alive with watery noise

i was always

in the water

the monotony of water

the closest thing to heaven

i shed my clothes my flesh cannot hide

the night teaches me a little

the sea plays along my back, the folds of my skin

there we stayed until shadows mirrored rivers

and there was no more song.