Ocean

I have always been
the last of our kind. Water
becomes me. You are

all water. Empathy
makes one of everything in the world.

Do you remember?

We began together. We discovered
time. It was a pleasure—finding that things would not be
the same, that there were days and
nights, that the sky

could change. And we filled
the world with ourselves. All that frolicked and died
came again. Time was kind, allowed most
anything to happen.

It was a warm and magnificent day.

It was cold and bitter on every
inch of earth. The miles
and years were nothing.

There was so much that you
were forced into smallness, just to understand
the difference in things, the width of the

world, the ocean. Come see. Look
at the water's enormous
depth, the steepest
ravines

plunge in the planet itself, diving like a knife into
the earth—a body so grand that it does not even know
where this wound begins or ends. What untouched
places are buried under ocean here? How many dark
coves wash themselves each night with the cold black
salty water that will find them once more in a thousand
years, here, in the crevices of the sea? And the currents.

The currents that howl between humbling ocean canyon
walls like the voice of all the unheard weary, surging through
the water, travelling the world, again, and again and again and
again. You may believe this is endless,

that the water must go on, as it appears to, from the edge of shore fading
deep and deathly blue past all thought far into the infinite horizon.

But you have not been listening.

It is the final wish of the world to depart as it arrived: one
small bare stone in the universe, purely
itself and covered in all of the odd rugged
shapes that suggest what it will and may have
been. I was everything in between. In
between. Before and after
me. I was so long.
And it was barely
a moment at
all.