Virginia Smith

[a protean geography] i

A woman enters an ocean and stretches,
grows immense in the swells, bridging coast
            with coast. Is she still

her body? an icon? the sea?  Our new definition
for water or shoreline:  soft   salt   lift-lilt   fall.

Red ribbons an oak branch, becomes a lizard
skittering over stone, garnet that circles a wrist.
            No, it is blue-

ringed with two clear-facet centers: gannet
eyes a world stares through, swallowed
            so long ago it is now
 
impossible to remove. Listen: beneath skin
the hiss of a thousand cities’ glass-rinsed shores,

            every step an intention
not to fall through earth, each face passed
a handful of questions we keep planting in sand:

                        come closer; stay
            distant; I am going somewhere
                        you can’t follow.

Planted and watered with sea, we watch sky come
unpinned and lower its braids to us,
clasp them round our wrists and begin to climb.

Virginia Smith is an MFA graduate of Northwestern's Creative Writing Program. Her work appears most recently in Denver Quarterly, Moria, Southern Poetry Review, and Stirring. contact