The Parting Ships

The first day after I came back from the flood was the warmest weather this skin has felt.
That time with this skin was the warmest I have felt out of this living and into some, any, other space.
Left looking into the two barrels of any fighting time is beyond where my moon shines, no matter where, and I am forever shaken to my roots by the carelessness with which the world shakes off its lives who breathe on the planetary air and sweets of water.
The day the flood came, my head overflowed with warmth and spilled into every imagined cavity under my sealing breath.
I have not slept in weeks. I live only on air. Even fruits are too much. Which way is sky? How might I fly? Whiskers diminish after the stroking, from feeling into plains above dryness which have never been touched by any kind of water, ever. This land is rock, dust, slate, choking. Only.

And yet there is a strange energy here: the air vibrates, as does everything, of course, but I mean in a much more noticeable way, as if it were trying to wake you up not merely from dream to waking, but from waking to some place just to the left, not really very far away at all except in dimension and awareness. This space, like all spaces, just sits, and calls, and strengthens itself with its ownness until the beaters from out of time arrive and reshape all thought and weather into the most common thread, that which can be seen by every eye, any eye, felt with every smell of thought beyond which even the most ordinary recreations are disallowed into the clearing at the end of the wet, shaking rainbow, the anvil forest which has sprung up only these last few hundred years to eclipse the yearning, burning flowers and undulating worlds of all the growing and all the under-time, over speculation, between shakes and inside-out of all the chordal inversions of sky’s shape and path of river.

This fine day has wet my hair and down my body to the nth degree of standing ground. This degree of finely standing has taken my nth-trained seal of inside-wax to rearrange – with all kinds of beautiful, loving anger and sweeping – the last tents of my untenemented ancestors, who have never slept on a ship, but only under them for all time.

Fallow is the breathing ground. Water soaks my wrists up to the knees of all my trembling thoughts, and I am breaking here, breaking ground, breathing for the first time since there were lungs the inside air, the over-the-shoulder seeing of all the midnight passengers ever swept to and fro by the random trains of human forgetting and sleep.

My breathing stills the night and wakens all the ships from private rest. The pavilions are creaking, the jetties are crumbling, and my sisters slip rocks into the dungeon-cups of waiting’s prisoners so that they can see, and see up to the light, far beyond any day’s toil of forgetting to be a prisoner. Their lips open with their eyes, and the truest water flows between their parched lips and soothes into their living. And breathe. And breaths. And not alone, not any more, you never were. Not even once were you alone. No other waits for you. It is your breath and every waiting form from all and all.