and water lies plainly

by laurie sheck

Then I came to an edge of very calm
But couldn’t stay there. It was the washed greenblue mapmakers use 

to indicate
Inlets and coves, softbroken contours where the land leaves off
And water lies plainly, as if lamped by its own justice. I hardly 

know how to say how it was
Though it spoke to me most kindly,
Unlike a hard afterwards or the motions of forestalling.

Now in evening light the far-off ridge carries marks of burning.
The hills turn thundercolored, and my thoughts move toward them, 

rough skins
Without their bodies. What is the part of us that feels it isn’t 

named, that doesn’t know
How to respond to any name? That scarcely or not at all can lift 

its head
Into the blue and so unfold there?