The Inchoate River
A poem
Where our sad brown river collapses at last
The sea is as still as mercury and clear as air
The sand has time to curl into glyphs and patterns
Like Arabic script, as the heavy slow tide
Pushes it to fall into unfathomable meaning
The light perfectly illuminates passages
Focuses on the stuff that drifts while
Tiny crabs peck along like punctuation
Known only to them
We can’t make sense of these
Messages let out of the bottle and
Unrolled wetly before us
Behind the wrack and the dunes
There are beach plums and saltgrass
There to write specific passages about how
Time and fickle air make clocks around them
A whole other world that we can’t read, either
We know for certain that
Not far out the bar drops three hundred feet
And dark water enfolds bottom creatures
That will never know day from night and
See only tragic, ultraviolet prey
