The Wake

You wandered slowly downstream
throwing your gaze to the other shore.
Small wonder: you have always loved
your coastlines. You’d dart for a stone,
like a heron fishing, pluck and then weigh
it in your hand, smoothing away the sand.

There are markings in the sand,
from somewhere younger in the time-stream,
another traveler on your way.
That day, you did not share the shore.
You sank through water, pretty stone
forgetting rivers you had loved.

There, in twilight, it seemed no one loved
you, your hair soft and brown as sand
and all their eyes as flat as stones,
the ones tossed out by shallow streams
to wait for you to tread their shore
and tell them each how much they’d weigh,

as if the world cared for a stone’s weight.
You chose two, only, that you loved
staring at you on the edge of the shore
one perfect, rounded by sand,
another bored and bitten by the stream,
hole-filled, less whole stone.

Later, you will choose a gravestone,
thread it through a chain to weigh
your neck, fill it with a stream
of tears. Only I know which one you loved
best. And when your body turns to sand
I will be waiting on the shore;

the farther shore, the shadowed shore.
You’ll know me, sitting on a stone;
we’ll bury ourselves in wet sand
neither of us caring how much it weighs.
It will embrace us and we’ll feel loved
as we watch the boats slip off downstream.

I stand on the shore, tracing the way
your path was set in stone, the way you loved.
Sand in my eyes, I follow the stream.