The Stillness in the Waves

All I had was a bubbling idea of who you might be

The Celsius in the motion framed an amorphous concept of a woman

Emitting wisps like a writer’s quill flitting with uncrossed t’s and grammatical contradiction

That rose from the caldera’s lava in a taunt of intoxicating empathy  

I saw the capacity for empathy in you  

However self-projecting like the mirror of Snow White’s queen

Maybe I sought to see what I want most in this world:

To be understood in layered symbiotic faculty of comprehended contemplation  

I know this to be a want, not an expectation nor assumption, but to be the

The aroma of potential which humans are meant to explore such sensations

As how is one to grow without otherwise wandering into the garden of fancy

Knowing the firmness of soil and the biology of deserts and rain forests?  

These bosky acres of deliberations occupying the magnanimous silence

Speak in such arias despite bearing neither the volume of instruments

Nor the elucidation of a vocalist; I could hear a thinker’s orchestra tuning

In the permeations of potential progress, the baton readying to be raised  

If the translation between Fahrenheit and Kelvin were possible

Then sentiments may find environments for memory like solidifying constructions

From gaseous into a palm curved in anticipation of being grabbed

Out of the parceled eon of expectation that in this now there is transformation  

From unknown into the pursuit of knowing shocking the mechanics

Of what was emboldened by the natural motion

Of atoms not changing internal composition, but changing aggregated form

As those swirling about the air in reticent distance may amalgamate into pliable liquid 

Set about the cup in which one chooses to drink between wine and water

Intoxication and banality, luscious red or clear and so

This drink sat on the table for but an afternoon

And evaporated out into the ethereal once more 

I witnessed the accumulating molecules in my superego disbanding into an aperture

Opening in comparison to the aberration before me, this empathetic capacity  

 

For a woman to be a brave sailor of seas mast raised and sail aligned with winds

Of heated air, the planet’s currents cycling in Pacific warmth swirling the globe

In ribbons of Magellan’s routes to push towards harbor readied to speak of voyages  

And I like Ulysses have tales of waters and war, felicity and pensive ennui

Staring at tides so distant from shore bartering listless indifference and universal interdependence

Peering into waves that bend into flatness in the perspicuity of stilling one’s self into meditative

Vision to pierce the sheen of the ocean to witness the infinitude of operations below the surface  

I see the nature of our species in cogs of coral, kelp, barracuda and porpoises mandated to surface; I see the cities men keep to themselves sunken and lively despite the barnacles and tubeworms; I see the heat in the staircases of liquid stories rising like buildings of translucent water flowing entry and exit of uncountable connected beings dancing  

Yet I see this only in the stillness, as so much of the world is enraptured by the waves of the surface, rapping, rapping, rapping at the floor of our todays, so unaware the ceiling of our tomorrows is shattering if we could only contemplate the essence of our capacity, by finding shape within the commotion to be a grand listener, a thinker of what is beyond, below our paradigm of distance 

Some see icebergs and compute, some see the volcanic islands of the world rising and barter inquiry, but so few sit patient in the mundane expanse of a silent Atlantic focused inside the eye of the hurricane and are at peace fathoming the fathoms, which in comparison make the waves into nothingness; as the space between the gravity of the moon and the Earth is to the space between light years of galaxy to galaxy is so in turn dusty irrelevance to the intimacy of God in ourselves of the interconnected one  

I saw the capacity for empathy in you

I know neither the certitude in outcomes of cups on tabletops nor the texture of hands,

But I saw this capacity to see the oceans for what they are independent of any telescopic lens

My history has been afforded and I was left with a mirage, a haze of mist and sand  

Ocean and shoreline mixed in the salty-grit of taste as this vessel approached the beach

For rations to head back out to sea, I came into the pub, poured the grape and

Fermentation took its course in reversion back into vine 

The work of industry enveloped itself in reverse swallowed like a hook converting Pinot Noir

Into a globe of purple water tethered to a verdant tendril patient for summer’s harvest

Knowing today is not a day to drink 

A man is drawn to regress into a hibernation of sorts after experiencing such things

Of staring up at Ursa Major longingly at the nebula and imbibing the waters of its dipper

The distaste of hope is so stoic a teacher, for appearances and actuality vary so  

The cheer of birthing stars reverberates only to realize the emitting gaseous orb has exhausted its potential by the time its light reaches one’s irises; so in, days die before they are ever born 

I know and care not for who you really are

You are sunken into the darkness of an epoch like such a distant galaxy

All I ever witnessed were refracted images carrying through remoteness

Like the star you were gone before I ever had the chance to see you

So in, the capacity I pondered is better placed as a hallucination upon the shelf of my cabin

Bolted down nonsense for men casting nets staring at the waves in place of the sun

We are all but glimpses caught reflecting that which we do not even know

Is within our dominion of consciousness  

In the sterile waters I was as I once wrote to you, a man simply seeing what fuels my self

Not to be anything to you, for whatever I thought of you was not you, but

A light beam jettisoned as flotsam from a foreign constellation and when a man speaks to the stars, however raised in decibels he is but bellowing inward  

No person is sustained by another; we are sustained by the reception

Of what we put out into the world being heard, being listened to,

This breathes most of our happiness back into us.  

We are making ourselves happy in this regard.

It may appear to some people at times from coming from another,

But in reality it is how the other allows us to feel based on what we are naturally inclined to do reflecting back to us, which is the grandest prize.  

This like the mirror of the waves I reverted my gaze to see a depth in you

In your written tone, the balance of worldly colloquialisms defying the assumptions

Of a singular gravitational placement in the universe as all beings appear bound

That those of such capacity are anchored to be juxtaposed in mathematical distance  

From those of requisite internal mass to substantiate their own logistics

I thought I felt the force of such gravity in you like a rare scientific undertaking

And yet these sentiments were always guttural differentials, not logic, not empirical,

But the folly of a man bending with the tides of want to satiate his stomach  

This was hunger for mutual sustenance seeing two tributaries converging into a river

Exchanging sediment to become that which was not possible alone and greater than the sum

It was the humility of human ache to be a nova and explode upon this world

If given the allotment of time  

So in I only know the bubbling idea of who you might be

Not love, not hope, not any solidified token as memento

Only an out of character rushed-man staring into the water thinking he was seeing stars

Cognizant he was only seeing what he wished to see in himself