Breathing
The outside reaches in, breath by breath.
And any other way it can.
Not that it intends to take over, just—
everything is at least a little porous.
My mother carries a rock up from the beach
and puts it on the step. Days later it falls to pieces, revealing
the small shells of burrowing clams, the coiled tube made by a worm.
The tide keeps sucking pieces out of the cliff,
rolling them, mouthing them, spitting them out,
until all that remains is where a fossil was.
The shape it left, or the shape it contained.
Even that ghost rubs and rubs away as it turns
to salt, the new tide spilling over.
Further out, a cormorant bobs, afloat,
before its next dive. What does it think
in its surface time? Before going under again?
Empty mind, waiting, or some inner joy?
Vast, glittering, dark—
Kelly Terwilliger lives in Oregon, where she works in public schools as an artist-in-residence and oral storyteller. She has two published collections of poems, Riddle, Fish Hook, Thorn, Key and A Glimpse of Oranges.
Amethyst Review 