Given
This spacious white desk
is my own open sky.
It floats unbothered, full of suppression and snow,
a moonless still swathe for the static
of my daily life.
Daily life – those words so pure and lulling,
one day following another, like it’s given.
The pull of some hidden gravity to the generosity of the desk,
still here each morning, vast and unmoved,
and on it the company of rocks and shells,
carefully chosen and carried over years, also still here
if rarely noticed these days, rarely seen for what they are
and where they’ve been: their former easiness with earth, with sea,
citizens of their own ordinary skies, their known place.
I could touch them like fog – the shiny lettered olive,
the ridged scallop, a smooth hand-sized grey stone –
but I don’t. They’re constant, and like the stars
they're vanishing from sight, shrouded, assumed.
On the same desk, same sky,
the paper scraps scribbled like an icy blizzard,
the urgency and dissipation of the scratched words –
what my body wants to express and remember,
take in, or release, like a searching raptor
who casts an inarticulate spell as it rises up, circles,
plummets through the echo of the weathering
sky, focused.
© M Wms 2022
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