A sea daisy blooms in the sea grass
behind me.
On the long coast,
the wind is an attenuated feather
of sound.
It will persist until it has circled
the world.
It will persist to Africa
and lay its invisible body on the desert there.
Piece by piece it will shed its single note.
The sea daisy will display itself for a day,
or another, and then
a blank space will tempt our eyes
to believe it is flowering in the dark.
Its simplicity will exhaust itself,
and my eyes will close.
When I open them
nothing will remain in me,
except a scrap of paper.
What traveled past me
when I wrote these words?
Did I miss the collision of a star?
Not see a mermaid appear from the waves
and beckon?
Did a plane crash in the sea
past the horizon,
and the last moment for a hundred souls
was the memory of a single night
drowning in the water.
Sea shells in the making?