Only Treading

Here amidst the Pacific
I have forgotten dryness.
The Saharan memory chants
no longer work—
yellow an abstract color, what some
once called my skin but
my webbed hands
breaking and rebreaking the skin of water
are not any color but
water. Dry perhaps is
the sensation of tickling, a bug burrowed
within, that deep in the throat
I knew but has left me.
Shriveled needles, concentrating sun
power into singular points, how
does a cactus live with being
unwanted
among the ferns, how
we float
just to live now, the water
is not life but illusion
thereof. They say you will
see things but I
never have, only sky
and sky
and sky
the largest hole
I can’t fall into.
The one constant still
mutable, blue to black
to bleeding dawn, not like
the sea a faceless mirror. Look down:
there is only yourself,
broken,
phantom arcs that don’t define you
stories you don’t believe
splayed against your palm.
It will take lifetimes to read
moving parts
to memories
to through,
but all you
have is
time.