Mammoth

All the good ones have done it. Taken to some sea

to avoid the look you get from the people who love you

when they aren't making loving you look easy.

I go in shallow, knee deep hardly. The sargassum a red stench.

For a million years it was just microbes in their torpor.

Waiting patiently for some pin point moment. All that work

leading to this mammoth mourning. This continual tossing

of angels. Anyone who's ever stood at the edge of any ocean

already knows. To be alive you had to be some kind

of consequence. The sequelae of time's piling birthmarks

and concrete. Empires of consumed ortolans.

The justifying that comes with teeth. Mostly I walk away

from epiphany finding it hard to separate enlightenment

from finality. I'd come all this way to learn to be alone

in case one day I ended up alone. It wasn't an impossibility.

Not with the way people walked in and out of each other's lives.

Even the Orca on her tour of grief. Some things

you don't see coming. Other things you swear you do see

and so they send you. Like the first film made of a train.

How the first audience to see the film was so sure

the train was headed straight for them. Half the theatre

running for its life. Mistaking light for fixity.

Sometimes all your hard work feels like a dirty trick.