“Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”
All evening, sitting around the small fire,
we looked up and talked about Venus,
how much she stood out among the stars,
how the night looked blacker, even
the pine trees behind us leaning south
from decades of hill wind. And as smoke
rose above our heads, my daughter, her friend
and myself, our small worries in the small world,
chatted a little about the antics of flames
far from the troubles of others, cocooned
in our openness like survivors on a life raft
while the big ship is sinking.
Later that night another beacon
shot across the sky, the Space Station, three men
from different countries, looking down
on the little swirls of water around the earth,
our names written in its rising and falling,
all of us pressed together by gravity,
everything blending into everything else,
disappearing with distance, the one thing
we can count on, but don’t want to.
Grant Clauser is the author of five books, including Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven (winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Award) and Reckless Constellations (winner of the Cider Press Poetry Award). Poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Cortland Review, Greensboro Review, Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry, and others. He works as an editor and teaches at Rosemont College. Follow him on Twitter @uniambic.
Author photo: Alex Cope
Image: “Grave of John Keats Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water” – Rome by ashabot
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