Trances of the Atlantic

Liam Powell

The green vocals of the sea

inch closer.

At night their stillness continues audibly and only

Andromeda can be seen.

The East extends indefinitely.

What we thought contained multitudes we found to be instead

one thing: not East.

In the way our experience of history

is: not now.

We enter its greenness

and are pushed back changed

together with the stars

and the oldest life, we turn slowly

and lend ourselves back to earth

with our stories

in a cold comprehensible only

as fourth degree burn. All that we touch

now is artifact.

Such that the floodlit field

on the horizon is precious to me,

and whatever happens

from here is reenactment

and here, we are so near the stars

my one leg becomes two, my one hand three –

our bodies in the cold behave as light

and if there is a color to the dark it is green

green as the sea that brought us here.