DEAR ALMOST, DEAR INEVITABLY,

by Kathy Nelson

Alkaline water washes through
my fingers— soapy, slippery with salt. 

How much lungs love breath.
How much the thirsty sun sips, sips
like a beggar from this bowl.

Each of us gets 4000 weeks, 
more or less, a few hundred more 
for me if I’m lucky. More 

than 50 million so far 
for Mono Lake, stretching 
across the desert, evaporating.

Kingdom of Fragile—corrugations 
of sand ripple along the bottom, 
knobs and spires of porous limestone,
like antique castles crumbling.

Kingdom of Imponderable—
water too briny for fish,
a thousand gulls and grebes feed 
on flying swarms of the nearly invisible—

teaching me the illusory nature of lack.
My curriculum—the world forgets 
all but its saints, its monsters. 
It will remember me no more 
than a generation or two. 

I am almost extraneous. 

In the floating of birds 
I grow languid, and a palpable blue, 
a granite gravity at the base 
of my spine gives way. Faraway 
mountains glaze cobalt over gray.

Kathy Nelson, recipient of the James Dickey Prize, MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and Nevada Arts Council Fellow, is author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books) and two previous chapbooks. Her work appears in About Place, New Ohio Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily and elsewhere.