Echo

Echo

How easy it is to touch the world. How easily it takes your eyes out
as lichen is a pale green inscribed on a grave stone windward
and pockmarked rising on a tilt. When do we think the dead will come back.
Lapérouse would leave.
Vanish sliding under a sail drowning in the daylight thrum of a wave.
His tiny biology’s birthed like a fish adrift
his taxonomies of seed spat in a sailors curse.
Up blackened roads the interlaced the intertwined hill
is a freeway that catches cars into corridors of night.
How easily it draws your eyes out as Martens provenance stays.
See him turn from the human tide rowed out to those small barren islands
the wisp of foam the hills receding mapped as topography is pulled out to sea.
(history’s mark here is bleak.)
See him turn as the sea rises up the fetlock of a canter
sketching from horseback your ancestor’s remains.