WHEN VIEWED FROM ABOVE, THE OCEAN

What if—with the clean mouth of a woman—I welcomed you.
What if the quiet math of who we are—not the calculations,
not calculating, I mean—what if it adds up. Divides.

On the phone one day I may tell you there are deer
in the garden—but where there is a garden there are
always deer. In this way only life is an ordinary poem.

Can I promise not to fill you, this, with the habits
of continual accruement? No. Identity is the way mistakes repeat.

For years I hoped to learn to tell stinging nettle
from yarrow; the one who bites from the one who heals.
But I have not. Instead I step lightly, though usually
not at all.

The same way we make the choice to learn by mimicry, and with
a currency of deliberate attention, this is also how we forget.

When viewed from above, the ocean—
we turn to nature in just this way, to bail us out from
the more difficult truth of ourselves.
We light the moon in the fawn’s black eye to avoid illumination
blooming elsewhere. In our own quiet selves is what I likely mean.

The press of hoof on tulip, the spine’s crisp snap—
How the lichen takes the tree—

And what if I welcome you, what does any equation bring but
another problem perched and patient to be enacted upon.
There is always room for that—there is only room for that.

A light refracted. And refracted. We are no small part of this.

How ancient can we expect anything to be? This, all things, are
more practiced. I practice disintegration, I am practiced at it.
In no small part is this true.

There is a wake behind any fast-moving thing, a physical echo
of what has been.

Iris Moulton lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her work can be found in Gigantic, American Short Fiction, Center for Fiction, and more recently in her book Tofu of Kansas(Sensitive House).