I once watched water hold the sky
with such tenderness I forgot its
slow bruising drifting by,
the fever rising in the clouds,
the small tremble of dusk.
And I believed in beauty.
But the surface only remembered light,
shivering what it held at night,
glistening with hesitation
and returning everything blurred
as if the world couldn’t look back.
A shimmer mistaking itself for touch,
a face that flinches
before it can remember who it belongs to.
The shimmer lingers,
a quiet promise that what looks back
might still be whole
might still belong to a breath
hiding in the current.
Beneath that wrinkled skin,
the light falters.
It stumbles,
folds back on itself,
and the deeper you go, the more
sound feels like a dream trying to wake.
Sometimes I dream of lost stories
a pulse that isn’t mine,
a window breathing in the dark,
a tower bent like kelp,
a street dissolving into echo,
its voices softened by distance
drifting in the current
without memory or name.
If you stay long enough,
you begin to hear your name in the current.
Not spoken, but remembered—
like the water is tasting the light it once cradled,
dear and trembling, in its waves.
Perhaps this is what the current holds:
a quiet settling beneath the waves,
a weight pressing without breaking,
hovering just above what cannot rise.
If you sink far enough,
the body stops asking for air.
It starts asking for memory instead—
for the warmth that once gathered behind your eyes,
for the first face that leaned over the railing
and mistook reflection for return.
Is this what the ocean keeps?
Not the ships, not the storms,
but the instant a hand lingered too long
on its surface, in its mercy.