LÚNASA

1. The roaring sky brimmed with thunderclouds, 

as the cupped wings of birds scalloped the air. 

Fall leaves feathered a vertigo edifice on the wind.

In the creek, shards of sunlight glinted 

and drifted off towards the shadows.

I thought of the siren call of sky and clouds.

and how the birds are born explorers, 

and the clouds are the culmination of dreams 

stitched to the hem of the horizon.

 
But I was caught up in familial distress.

How easily the acrobat of the tongue 

betrays us when we least expect it.

I didn’t know that a derailed tongue 

was merely one train of thought.

There were other stories. Other endings.

The bog is a transition between land and water. 

Its buried secrets harbor the still music 

of the speckled pools of wisdom, and trout

seeking a story line, a neutral buoyancy 

between solidarity and solid ground. 

2. The abyss offshore fed the undertow, 

the coastline scalloped by hungry storms.

Who advised me to swim toward the outsider?

But the waves kept stacking up far from shore, 

remnants of an invisible storm far out to sea.

I swam down each trough to meet the next wave.

And so on. The invisible strand only came into view 

when I rode the crest. Was I mammal or fish? 

Would I drown this far from shore?

The lifeguard station was minuscule, 

and I knew that rescue could only come from within. 

I was no more than a whitecap, or a seagull on the waves, 

an afterthought. I could disappear forever in this vastness.

How long would it be before she missed me? 

That mother sleeping off the night before.

So I began that long trawl toward the beach 

learning that I could rescue only myself.

Winded, I lay face down in the warm sand, 

numb from the cold embrace of the sea. I was 10.

8/2/23 

This was a collage, a pastiche—as poets read their poems, my mind wandered, so it’s half freewrite, half stolen words, exacerbated by the imperfect transcription onto page, with no thought of subject or structure, that came later. My collage was in three parts then written as one piece., but this sure looks like two poems versus one.