Into Something Rich and Strange
Sometimes you can feel the distance
creeping in, continental drift where you wake up
and Madagascar is gone. You know
it was just here. Yesterday you saw it, bobbing
out on the waves; today,
just another disappearance, another channel
wider than the space between the strand
and the corner of sky-sea.
There are days when the sky
chips, the patina
scratches off, rubbed by a dime,
and the horizon splays out
like a dissected frog. On these days, the deckled
edge of evening, the silence of sinking,
leaves you wondering about
floating islands and why the sky resembles
a dropped plate, faulted by falling.
We will not all sleep, but we will all be
awoken. We will not all change,
but we will all be
transformed. Love
digs graves one atop another
and lovers are buried like layer
cakes. The sea changes, the coral grows
with each new wreck, and somewhere beyond the sinking,
a new island appears to someone watching
from another shore.
***
Read more of Adam Hughes’s poetry.
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Photo by kokopelli1330/Flickr
