In Your Dreamwake, A Whale
Blue bleed through the glassy essence, wakelife into dreampivot: the glacier will examine you now. Follow the stream of pink quartz petrified in once molten granite. Faceted on the inside, the chamber will hold you in a hum. What do you bring here? What will you take away, complicit in the melt? All your plastic convenience, the gravest.
The dolphins were afraid for us. We didn’t know to be afraid. From the far shore we launched our red and yellow kayaks into the sound. Black paddles, our waterfeet, sliced air, coaxed water, propelling us toward immensity. Dolphins crossed our path. Auspicious, we thought.
The small ferry with the normal people docked at the jetty. On a pebbled beach we stashed the red and yellow plastic vessels, tripped along the river through birches to a quartz pavement. We nearly turned back; the glacier receded as we advanced, didn’t want to be reached by us. Under the arch, a sapphire cave. Midsummer blue drips, crackle, a tunnel to the sky; a frequency that thrummed, reading our silent rhythms for their historical resonance.
Dreamthrum of the watertwin, the whale in your mirrorwake seeks passage to the heart. Melt, freeze, cryofracture; cycle of your spires. Split by water expansion, your expansion; hollow blue welcome ushering the polyphonic wingrush of feathers, whispering the down draft, the down. Dolphins ride you home.
First published by Canadian journal The Ekphrastic Review, as part of the John Paul Caponigro writing challenge.