TANIC THINKING AND 4 BODY

Laura Kelsey, OP Contributor

48 tHE oTHER PRESS OCTOBER 12 2006

Squinting against one thousand suns
that are glinting from one,
reflecting in water murky enough to stand in.

It’s a wonder any light escapes its surface at all...

The wind arrives and begins its stylist ways,
transforming a perfect hair-do back to its primal
state.

Walking through fine sand, in the midst of expelled
plumage

and vacant crustacean condos,

conversation always seems to ebb away with the
tide

and thoughts are drawn into the water,

like the debris that thought it was finally beached
but was caught up in the waves once more.
Doomed, or blessed

to continue drifting,

occasionally reaching a temporary shore

until it becomes so smoothed and refined

by a relentless surf

that it is nothing more than a grain of sand.

No different than the millions of others surround-
ing it,

just younger,

and they have neither time nor patience for their
fellow captive.

Although this may have been the most brilliantly
beautiful of stones,
now, as a speck amongst specks, it loses the distinc-

 

OF WATEK

tiveness it may have once had.

It awaits the time when the water will have its way
with it once more

and it will be pounded into oblivion...

...looking out as the seagulls
coast along the coast...

The present shakes its way back into consciousness,
and it is pondered

that these are just fruitless thoughts

when one is standing next to a body

that goes a thousand times deeper than any human
could.