11.23.17

The day darkened
as it began.
I sat on rocks
and observed the water
beat itself.
A child appeared
fifty yards away, roiling in the waves, spinning
and twisting, running through the air as the
sea shot him up and sucked him back in
like a speck of grease, absorbed. I wanted
him and knew nothing of him but wanted
him as if he were a part of me detached,
a child made with you, ripped from my arms,
I waded. Out waist deep I felt the sand pull from under
my feet and in I was with him, my son, bodies contained by the
weightless force of liquid, binary. It was lost on me.
The harmony of our deaths like a string pulled taught and allowed
to quiver till it’s cessation, a note issued by its end(ing)
rattling a cry against reckless forces, the general doom of
the universe, written, revised, and discovered in moments
on the far side of comprehension, moments that ask to be imagined even
as they’re happening,  like when my son was born out of sunshine &
articulated & erased by the fire that created him, burned alive by the
water which was infinite and which defied its own limits by outgrowing
the furthest distance in each direction.
The mountains were smudged out of existence
as if composed with a lead pencil and rubbed with a wet
thumb. Every possibility was
happening at once. I became
another molecule in the spin.
How pleasant,
to drift to the bottom
of the sea.
How pleasant,
to look up
where the light
grew weaker.
But at last I’d
found him. At last
I could ask: What do
you remember?
And he’d say: Your first
years on earth were blissful.

Written at 1:04 at night, in my office, in Agoura Hills CA.