She All But Thought

She’d wrapped herself adaptively

into, around and partly through

a large outcrop of gray sea rock

lodged just offshore – Nature’s version

of the work, perhaps, of Henry Moore.

She knew as much as any of us

what the living had to do on Earth:

proceed from birth to study objects

and their circumstances fully

and strategically enough to make up

certain-seeming stuff that you could say

you knew, but didn’t. She liked to think

she had been bidden by and to this

half-submerged and private promontory –

sea-beleaguered yet somehow still

eager to relate its story – eroded

and elated by the water. She all

but thought she was its daughter.

.