Driftwood

Of negative space, water dragging buildings
down into their own muttered, long whispers.
The shore's absent cement fingertips,
the least clumsy of all, forgetting to hold.
Sent and not received over and again.
Sent like flood rains and famine. Unwanted.

Your canals are narrow and burdened
outward to the enormity of loss
standing in the great depth of the sea.

You flicker in the light waves near shore,
like a secret message. A note. Sunk
in the paper wrists of weeds, I am a dormant
thought; alone but embraced, come
to rest in the blotted fog in this spot.

Between surface and surface a film bends
itself around the frames of the empty.
It makes me heavy, my mouth drinking
every drop of the putrid clouds. Suddenly,
a force like hands sends me tumbling, and
on the surface your flicker glides across
the water's face like a small bird making
its way southward through the hills;
and somehow, the impossible seems better
fit to living than the barely imaginable.


Daniel J Olmschenk