Vestigium—
it's what a cloud does:
unzips, sometimes in satin
sometimes in cilice
s.
lee
Like trod on mud at half-tide,
it’s water filled foot-prints rising up
that stun me somehow, the way
they saturate as soon as I set
my boot down. This is section
of the beach I love the most
that depresses me the most, how
it pulls and sucks like an ill-bred
lover, all need, all grit and salt
and self. I want to
press my face into it
make sand angels in sweeps,
clam-worm a halo. I
don’t want
to look back at the way my gait
is pressed into the dryer edges
up the beach. These
footprints,
are never as stable as a tidal pool,
whose two faces are all ground and cloud,
unplumbable yet the bottom’s
so close. Minnows
spook. Mussels
tighten under the weed.
Random
stones stay put. Were they
there yesterday?
How much can all these things hold?
Each bauble above this sea pond
seems to sizzle and swell with August’s
sun. And those
minnows, jiggered
by the rim, are thin wisps, cirrus
if I’m seeing sky. All the while the tide
grows large again—it seems to
exhale, pushing itself ahead
of itself, all that’s been
drained coming back.
And my foot-
prints never were.
They dis-
appeared almost as soon as I rose
up from that angel i never made and backed
away, fresh mud not on my tongue
the tide coming but still out, way out, too far
away to hear, yet turning.
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