This beach with sand impersonating stars dead is long
and all this wood has drifted far
to be here out of water we don’t know how rare
or how or why each has lived
in forces under the speed of light
your hands will also drift in wind to hold them a hunger
for smooth skin
feeling for a pulse from another world
that maybe is just the same
simple thing drowned in the parts of bodies swept out
on wild shore becoming other real things
in scrub willow leaning to take sun moon piper
and crab to empty out and fill in
a different whole the tide will not care about
the shape the alien language the lack of color that is
all colors bending inside
and you will wonder when the setting days will leave you
carved and burnished and fit for postcard
or mantel or stone in field a solitary rock suspended
for miracles in a forest the white-grey
of mushrooms dining on the dung of dark beetles
and these quiet limbs like yours are maybe
not done traveling from surface to other
body with roots tangled in pith.
D.B. Goman is a writer, photographer, educator, and walker who has lived in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Poems, stories, essays, and photography have been published in a variety of print and on-line journals: Quarry, Orion, Eye Magazine, 2River View, Travel Mag (UK), The Literary Bohemian, 2 Bridges Review, New Verse News, Sisyphus Magazine, Amethyst Review, The Raven’s Perch, among others. A collection of poetry has been published by ES Press; another collection of poems and photography, as well as a YA novel (a nature adventure), are forthcoming next year.
