Watermark

for David B

4am, he wakes, reaching out –

mountains, chiselled valleys, a small 

sea between us – to say he is thinking

of the poem I will write, 

spinning his sketch of its vastness

as if a fringe of the endless sky

has entered his words.

not only the Earth – slivers of moon,

and of moons, the dust of galaxies

in the buzz of his vision.

he confesses: he cannot tell

if the size of it, this poem

he is sure will arrive, will fit

on any page. he is certain

it carries time the way we all

carry in our cells the muscle

of the Earth itself, which is to say

even the rocks swim in the deep

well of its origin. ‘watermark’, he says,

call it that, though no word will contain it. 

he says he has seen

ice on the verandah step

creep out of the night and knit,

as it spreads, into the shape

of coral ferns, bristle ferns, the wood

under their grip knotted with its own

imprint of liquidity. ‘watermark’, he says,

will do – the way trees

wrinkle up as they bend, 

the way his thought spills

into poems, the way blood and rain

and light, yes, even the light

pools with the weight of the universe.

do you see, he asks. the Earth

shedding its ripples into the quiver

of his body. our tiny bodies.

each wave inhales. lifts and flows. before 

and long, long after us. the poem

bundling it all and holding us

the way days hold barely anything,

a pinch in the space-time curve,

bottomless and billowing.