The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane

Codicil

Codicil Including the cost of a monument and inscription. No monument. Let me be ash thrown out to tide among the rags and flotsam of the shore and the severed beads of the bladderwrack. Or drop from a dory a brown glass jar weighted with sand for the barnacles to reach their gritty fingers toward and tumble in the oil-ooze of the flats. The inscription: that foamy trace when tide turns and the osprey from her perch turns also, or, where a salmon leaps, or where the sleek unsaying hides a loon. No epitaph. Even a stone returns to the nest of processes. As for the soul, nothing will hold or mark it but the same impermanent elation, heart to heart, a word, like a live fish in water, sometimes shows. 62 / The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand ...