Elemental

Awake before dawn, sunlight sliding up 

and through grayness, I catch moments of clarity 

in suspended haze. In this fluttering stillness, 

thoughts and time expand, then burst and rush, floating 

fast— there then gone, audible only as a whisper. 

Clouds return, a hanging gray prevails over sunlight, replaced 

by the pressing in of blue by afternoon. I shape words into verses

on the screen: enjambing, erasing, replacing, reforming fires 

and tenderness, feeling both blaze and softness rise in me— 

a building of anger and a kind of tenderness, a kind of love. 

This duality speaks daily, reminding me of all that is beautiful 

and all that is broken. Only when I swim and sleep do these fade 

into the background, fall away under cooling waters and a blanket 

of unconsciousness— states of buoyancy and hyper-awareness, 

like the suspension of sky just before dawn. A separate and welcome 

silence, a bubble where the harbingers of time and consequence:  

politics and economics, fault and folly, wars and racism, disease and 

discrimination and delegation, human strife and our world on fire— 

cannot touch me. In it nothing is broken, everything is whole, 

what matters is only water, air, earth, sky. The feeling of rushing ripples 

against my skin, the way the blanket shifts and falls over me, 

the underwater hum, a soft pressing, the delicate way  

my muscles release tension, every fiber giving way: 

to openness, to rest, to peace— 

to wonder.