I split my fingers across
your warm palm to
touch you without holding your hand
floating between surface and floor
like a whale, knowing balance is temporary,
needing to come up for air some time, not yet, we
connected because of our connections,
having endured the same space for decades
but a distance apart, less related than we relate
ungulates. you
with odd toes and me with even.
me more related to cetaceans than to you.
coagulate. this mess of you and me.
togetherness an outcome. concreted, aggregate.
conjugate. both adjacent and transformed. all verb.
existence without nouns. imagine
a full breath to prepare
for a long descent. underwater.
slow motion neck turn
up toward the light, the sea is a dim lens.
you pull your hand away and roll right,
I am still, colder. fluke
on the bottom flutter, momentarily expose their existence.
to be known.
George W. Shuster, Jr. is a life-long Rhode Islander and a lineal descendant of Anne Bradstreet, the first woman poet of colonial America. He studied poetry at Columbia and the University of Virginia, and h has been writing poems for four decades. He is a publisher and editor of Prudence Dispatch, a poetry journal.