…until all that was left was two lovers
in darkness, / whispering together
words never uttered before.
'The Inverse Wave'
Worm Song
Articulated
servant of the plain truth
seldom stated,
part link, part chain,
serpent echo
in the slow lane
though sawn in half
on your journey
to the heart
of darkest matter. O lonely
shunting of the earth song
too low to sing; O hole
in the ring; O dull
but faithful sexton
of hallowed ground,
of growth and change,
pushing ahead
(again, and still again)
to where the sun
can never enter
though the rain seeps in—
O mindless worker,
blind muck-raker,
self-buried miner,
in your endless night
unmake all this, we pray,
to make it all alright.
Faith
Pushed out of the boat, my father
like so many of his siblings learned to swim
out of necessity. He’d seen, no doubt,
a sack of cats go down into the same
Dinin River, and might well have dreamed
the blackness at the far end of that string
of beads, those seeds of air that rose
to bloom and blossom on the water’s skin.
And perhaps that helped. More likely though,
fear moved faster through his veins
than any conscious thought, and he was
kicking water, grasping, gulping air
almost before he knew he’d been pushed in,
his father extending from that small craft
an arm or splintered oar with which
to fish him out, still gasping, into an ark.