Century Song
For a hundred years
it seems
I've waited here, wasted here,
full of parch and motion, a salty throat
from drinking too much ocean once
though it's been
no more than a lifetime
or a breath
held under a thousand passing thrones
of aqua-green
where I counted days as quicksilver fish,
as coral bones, marked each dagger flashed in
mouths of sharks, each scale, each whale
singing to all her kin while I
I drowned alone.
For a century
it seems
I trod this water milling, to breathe the years I knew
still held the spark,
the flowers' poppy dream, the moths unflamed,
the coyote's bark
longing for the moongleam
on your reaching arms.
For a century
or two
the heat is master;
the dust that birthed you,
the sun that calls you on.
It blisters me as the freeze of aeons
boils a distant steam, until night's mantle
falls across the blaze, and in the end perhaps,
too many too-bright ghosts and burning days
earn me a last cool breeze
a breeze and a flashing of that dream
where you
come back for me.
July 2022
posted for dVerse Poets
Images: Waves, detail 1969 © Javier Torices Fair Use
Study for the Spanish Dance, 1869 © John Singer Sargent Fair Use
