AMALGAM

 

 

I found a small rock

gleaming, with its sparkle of mica

and grains of sand in shadowed 

crevices at low tide, an amalgam 

from the once alive, 

so light it might have flown,

 

a brain aloft in a seabird’s skull,

or wingless it flew, a meteorite shorn 

from a distant place, and plunged

as cormorant into the cove’s gray water, 

a bird searching for a fish

to bring glittering to the surface,

 

its cosmic weight its own, 

fed before it was found, this 

rock a remnant, little moon 

of our solar system, 

I turn in my damp hand

in dry daylight.

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James Brasfield is the author of Infinite Altars, Ledger of Crossroads, and Cove, forthcoming in Spring 2023, from Louisiana State University Press. He lives in Belfast, Maine.

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