Poem for Thursday, July 11, 2013

What We Leave Behind

The lost cry of the seabird, Neruda said.
This is true, along with the damp
sand, its stick-scrawled proclamations
of love and the lovers

who wrote them, barefoot
and young. Next the ships, masted
under sails of white surrender, built
from oak trees, from spruce trees

that once skinned our arms,
that once sliced the moon
with its branches and peppered us with
the light. Then everything else

too burdensome to list that accretes
into something cosmic, something
composed of stardust, cups of coffee,
library books, conversations and

bougainvillea vines. Finally, the seabird

itself, crying out an elegy against
roars of salt-tinged wind, hungry
for reaction.