In a desert far away at night
There is a dark and empty pit
in the desert sand
with whom I spoke
for an evening when
it held my voice.
It understands
loss.
Once upon a time, it held an ocean.
That dark and starless night,
I knelt beside the block-wide empty pit -
slated for construction - trapped between traffic.
Like a hollow ear still turned to open sky
it received, like a broken offering,
a shared, full-shouldered sob,
the salty heave of a distant wave,
and could not see the tiny oceans in my eyes;
Nor could I hear its oceans past.
There was time, and room, there in the night, in the desert, in the empty pit that no more held an ocean,
with even the sand dug out of it;
there was room in that container
to hold the kind of howl
that unwraps itself around someone bereft.
