Panthalassa

The light that hummed in the amniotic sea
The algae that latticed itself into Tokyo-sized mats in the shallows
The moment the world became a benediction

          it started snowing in the old quarry

The sky hymned

          and I felt wee, owlish

The endless tinkering of subduction 
The blueprints for teeth 
The syrinx, cirrus, the skate egg case

             staring out over the valley from cut rock 

The psalms of Tethys and Mirovia

             to the smoke of my own chimney

The wet heaven tinged with the stink of love 
The stink of growing beyond oneself—

///

Strata of the roadcut, candelabra 
      of sumac, the ox-
            shaped hills of the peneplain

The gills of the gar
    of the estuary’s brackish 
            shelf, breathing all tides

The veery slowed down sounding
    like Sunflower Slow Drag
            like Weeping Willow

When I’m wary 
    of weariness each feels the very
            crux of somethings more

The very depth of the glacial lake,
    the very first kiss,
            very scattered-to-the-winds—

///

—one night in Truro on the wrist of the continent a twitch of my eyes sent them to the Bight of Benin, to Svalbard, to Gaul, to the horse latitudes, through the emphatic and not-so-emphatic geographies of the night, to everywhere I was before being born in this place, bundle of musculature wet and off-guard, wisps of hair and bone, length and weight, reverse-ghost like snow just starting to fall, the luck of it all—illumination—

///

The river swelling like a flock of altos mid-verse in Misteriou joaius
The river sidling and consuming the bluff
The moment it disappears forever

         two yearlings spy me from across the frosted traprock

The whole configuration may reverse

         and retreat into multiflora rose

The endless plains become endless plains of ocean
The borders dissolved
The lignin, the leaf, the heartwood

        though their breaths remain in the freezing air

The vespers of the clades

       
        that burns in my lungs too

The named returned to namelessness 
The song the same

Note: The phrase, “wee, owlish” comes from “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie” by John Jeremiah Sullivan, The New York Times Magazine, April 13, 2014.