between

moon,

between what’s completely

full and what’s completely

empty there is a thin, inaudible

pause, and you, because you

are soundlessness itself,

are power

trapped behind the tongue

of the mute.

Can you taste, though?

Can your bumped tongue

stumble in the dark

between high tide and low tide

and find the very middle

of the tipping point?

And if you can, would you

wait there for me,

beneath it all?

What is that caught energy called,

that tight lipped spring

pushed down

into it’s own throat

and then stayed?

That’s the space

I wait in, that I am pulled

up by the chin

to look at you from.  It is

the broad palm of my fright

that, beneath my chin, is the spin

uncorking, prying in,

a firm fulcrum

in the very eye

of all that’s been waiting.

I am afraid. 

If I do not push down, at least

for some while,

being pulled up would suck

the blood from me, my coil undone

completely, and I will spill

from that old drilled place

you entered

and the salt and the sea

will congeal me, and I will drift

like once were

hand-planed planks

from a schooner called MOON

tossed between the peaked

waves of unmapped night,

broken open,

then brought, through the years,

through sky and foam

to lay at my feet like the slave

culled from the crowd, gleaming

in the heat, bent to bulge

to bear the load the rest of the way.

Can you see where I am

from where you are?

I know.

It’s dark

and you are a long way

off.  It’s here

in the middle—between the spring

and the flood

tides that demand that everything

be completely

utterly blind,

surrendered and surrendering,

still as pillars that once,

before quarry,

were birds, were the shells

these birds scavenged for

life caught by the throat

of life

like this!

oh moon

which way must I grope

if I am to keep you?

which way must I drown?

on dry land or in the suffocating

wet

closing slowly over one foot

pulling slowly away

from the other?