The Estuary
A sestina
In the dream estuary mud is alive with flamingos' coral flow
their yellow toes buried in the face of the mirrored moon
beaks spooning up warm worms that turn on the ebb
of yesterday to bolts of storm-worked silver
among the reedy songs long rimed with salt
that paint a mime's blank white on the changing river.
Summers' weeds black-lace the ice-pock craters, edge in river,
stubbling down to staggered stems where nothing flows.
Still, here we basin weeds and snow together, sweet and salt
spiraled milky smooth, stranded in a sudden fall of moon;
the coming sea that floods each tarnished top with circled silver
cries before dying in our arms, a white-boned ebb.
We are also in that moment, alien and identical, an ebb's
shoulder from the places where we touched. In the tangled river
language of affinity and loss, you write your silver
runes upon my hair; we hear we've lost enough. We sift the flow
for comely bits of iron comedy, for relics of the servant's sinking moon
trapped in columned hours bleached and bleating in their pillory of salt.
I keep my eye on rock-torn shingle whitened by a sepulcher's salt
wound, you watch the blue horizon stretching from this pebbled ebb
to the birth-blood of a blind thing whelping her litters of moons,
dropped to drift aimlessly off on the tick of the restless river
that I have learned to welcome, flood and flow,
as my inconstant lover, servicing me with lenience and quicksilver.
In the dream estuary, wading a hundred thousand silver
roads that ache with snow, winding fingers through a century of salt
I measure each brackish heartbeat in your flow;
I feel you pulse my throat at my own life's ebb,
a meeting where the ocean loves the river,
a shattered, reshaped promise to the robber moon.
I hold you as the ash tree holds her vain-caged moon,
an empty outline far from rock reality's shot at silver,
yet full of light, a fuzzy gilding on the dimples of the river.
I forget the bitter glint of trickling salt,
the painted mime's black tear on this masque's ebb,
remember only what receives us dreaming as the estuary flows.
Between the weeds and snow, flow the moon and go;
the blend and ebb of silver sing together. Neither sweet nor
salt, sea nor river, yet two are one at last and changed forever.
"estuary: that part of the mouth or lower course of a river in which the river's current meets the sea's tide." ~dictionary.com
Photo: Allegheny River, Winter
copyright Diana Lee Matisz 2015
copyright Diana Lee Matisz 2015
Used with her generous permission. Thank you, Diana!
You can find more of Diana's exquisite work on her Instagram page, here, and more about her, with links to all her blogs and her Red Bubble store, on her About Me page.
