cetacean ovenbird I see the rubber rise of their oceanic skulls, two black sand islands of basalt and obsidian, fed by volcanic breath rising in clouds of vapour and kelp. Humpbacks. So strange in this place that is not a sea, but a deep culvert carved from stone that saw the dinosaurs melt into myth. I dive into water as dark and dense as hematite and watch them approach, swift and liquid, silent and oh so awake to the delirious dance of time and space. I feel their bodies slide over mine as they pass, their mass unfathomable, their consciousness engulfing my own. This is how you came to me: a mind made of water, teeming with plankton and diatoms, enough to feed me forever, enough to oxygenate every shrinking cell. You rose, impossible, from the depths of a past I only half remembered, arrived all at once, a buoyant weight, a startling shadow. I reached to touch the unbearable gravity of your song and answered with all the air I whittled into poems during years of sleepless nights. This is not a dream from which I want to wake. We could be castaways and never fire the flare that would bring the world back to us. 260812 what's it to you? who go blather from