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This is a duplicate that we are editing in the Poetry category

There had been small craft advisories,
Their boats were fewer,
Seas ran five to eight feet
With variable winds out of the northeast
Gusting to forty knots
Moving with the pod
Warm southern waters flowed into the currents.
As the storm abated and seas subside
We pass Provincetown
‘Round the horn
Passed the buoy
Into the sensations of the bay
Seas two to four feet
Sun obscured and waters warm
Echoes echo over the distances
Off the top and bottom
The floor and the air
Wave action pushing me toward land
Been in these waters before.
Now slightly disoriented
Separated from the group
In too shallow water
The waves are foamy
Something’s not right
Sensing hazard
The tides confusing
I bottom out
Helpless and alone
Sand below and around me
Socked in on my belly
I do not wrestle
I die, fin up,
Without struggle,
Resigned on the shore.

On a humid, dark, cloudy summer night,
Temperature still in the high seventies,
Streetlights not working,
I step from my car as a huge fluttering bug
Flies smack into my lips.
I do not see it.
I know it is not a moth or mosquito,
More a furry flying beetle of some sort.
And just as I do not see it, I do not hear it.
Rather I feel its flutter and the soft thud
As it crashes straight into the very center of my closed mouth,
Smack in the middle of my pressed lips.
I blow and brush it away quickly,
Feeling its dimensions only slightly.
I respond in surprise and shock,
But without fear or disgust.
I know at once that I have been sweetly touched
Not assaulted or attacked.
And though my rational mind recognizes it as probability expressed
A happenstance of fate,
A random intersection of invertebrate and human,
I am aware instantly of having been kissed by a beautiful stranger,
A princess living in the body of a bug,
The light but explicit tap tap tap of god’s finger
Calling forth my attention

“Hey you,” the bug commands with her furry kiss,
“Wake up, we’re in this together, man.
Live life fully aware
And appreciative of me,
Fly around in the muggy dark night
Kissing strangers with me
Let’s be in each other’s company as much as we can bear.”

I dream that night I stand beside the rushing waters
Of a mountain stream which calls to me,
Bids me enter,
To be pulled along in the frightening, exciting, inexorable flow to the sea.
I imagine being in the water.
I imagine being water.
I am a furry bug
I kiss your lips.

During the night a warm front
Passes over the frozen snowpack
And with it a sense of hope
And forbearance
Of limited visibility
Thickened air
And the pregnant
Odors captured in foggy droplets
That wolves and hunters know
Air warmer than the earth
Cats mewling
As we are mewling
In darkened bedrooms
Resentment, regret, and sorrow
All now like snow on the ground
Hidden in the wondrous fog

We stones don’t speak very loudly
Start there.
And although we can yelp and scrape
And bang into one another as well and as loudly as most matter you’d know of
The fact is that stones are mostly quiet
Introverted some would say
Not like creatures with their mouths open and life cycles measured in milliseconds
No, we go back before the stone age, waaay back,
Part of the molten age
After the gas age
When all was one blended brand
Before the Great Differentiation
Before air, before water.
Before I was whole
Before I was broke
Mostly quiet
Often wet
Rolling a lot and for a long time
And getting better at it
On a beach somewhere
Recently deposited
After many long journeys
Well rounded
Attuned
Mobile
Maybe even curious by now
Aware of the heat of the sun
And the cool of the night
The soft of the sand
And the soft of the hand
That lifts me
And numbers of my kin
And brings us to something called home
And arranges us he says
In some design he says
That is absolutely unintelligible to us.
But it is nice to be resting again
And I seem to be in contact with other stones
Who also came home with me
From the beach.
I like change
And I like rest.
And just bein’ a stone is alright with me.