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Metastasis

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By David Baker

For Stanley Plumly

Then the breakers turning back to brightness, if the light’s
opaque ocean-blue sameness in the sky can be said to break,

the way the waves themselves, blue in back of blue
like a color in the eye, fall back to the wall — sea wrack,

driftwood, or the inner optic shelf behind the lens.
Then the gulls and simple cirrus strands turn back to light.

Then to inland sparrows, drifting under blue Ohio’s sky — 
it’s a work day and the heat is the heat of the color

of your clothes, wash day, and hands hurt from the swinging of a scythe.
Then it’s day into night at the heart of the seeds

that fell from your hands breaking open, strewn in rows
like water along the ancient seabed floor of the farm.

Someone is standing at the door. Someone is waving from the car.
This day and that one sinking to brightness and the blue

evening wall before that, and a seed that fell from a star
becoming, as you will say, one day, all we will become.

Source: Poetry (January 2015)
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This poem originally appeared in the January 2015 issue of Poetry magazine

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Metastasis

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By David Baker
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