Member Poem

I'll love you
perpetually and
I'll never hear a song without your voice in it--
in this particular hymn, early tonite,
my tears make a dry seabed of my cheeks.
.
Perpetually,
the silence laps on the rocks
into tide pools where it is possible to be safe
to behold a terrible beauty
that pales my own life's sum of its parts,
save me from the day I might lose you to that monster.
.
The gods are nothings,
the angels are only stories I was told to
avoid the more pertinent lore-
out there, sirens sing lullabies to the men
who are dead already, and
they know not what they do.
They cast their nets wide
to gather in what sustains them.
To become a predator is terrible too.
.
Perpetually, the dawn shines and
never sinks into the shoulders of cliffs.
On the day I looked out
into a void that looked like my own eyes and
saw everything I once speculated to be possible
collapse into memories of poems written about the sea,
my body disappeared, and
I became someone more like you,
and then I lost the first teeny piece of you
who are a butterfly catching the breeze for a ride.
You will drink from flowers.
.
Perpetually are we sleeping.
For a few seconds at a time, are our eyes able to open
and I see my children in place of my hands,
their own hands and eyes and selves
scattered like the small rolling waves on the Pacific
that mist the bodies of whales,
that carry me to the place I must live from now on.