Below the Lifeboat
       

If you wake up under your life, you see
the shore fall away and fade, no oars, no voice
to do your singing, no blue marble for luck,
a rumpled dollar, but so what? Something rants
in the farthering trees, from here

mere tick of motion. A sleeve of sun left:
slipping. The life you thought was yours—
you kept trying to save it—closes like water and
you can't see past flesh, can't feel your hands.
The water grows. You want to drift.

Then anger bigger than memory, then praise
for all you lost, then the pale and flowering
landless place and flashing fish, past
the scattered word "me," into the
rank, the translated and free.

Copyright © 2010 Nancy White All rights reserved
from Detour
Tamarack Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission