SLAM!

Atlantis Lost

We left in the chill stillness of February night,
with the groaning dirge of water-swollen wood,
waves nipping at pilings, which rose from the surface
like the fingers of ancient ruins,
and the thrum of engines shivered along the contours
of cold, salt-peeled handrail,
into the tips of my fingers.

Red and white serpents of shifting harbor lights
rippled and reformed on the water, even then fading,
though they pursued us across the dark sound
like phantoms not ready to be abandoned.

On deck, the mist wore ice and took tiny bites of skin
each time my fluttering cape bared my arms.
and I -- unprepared for the cold of open water, but stalwart --
remained, unable to turn away from my island home.

I'd been dismantled piece by piece,
fragmented, and enshrined there
in an Atlantis not marble-walled and gilded
but scabbed with barnacles and scrub pine,
littered with polished driftwood and saltbox houses.

Closing my eyes, I tasted brine on the wind
as it twined past me, alive with whispered farewells,
words of loss, of fathomless sorrow.

The survivors of Atlantis must have felt like this
as the sea engulfed their golden island-city ,
disconnected and adrift in this purgatory
between home and nowhere.

Then, across fog-stilled water, the edges softened,
coastline blurred to a lingering suggestion of form
or maybe only memory held too long,
as silhouette by dark silhouette my Atlantis disappeared,
lost not to a cataclysm of consuming waves
but to the metronome-tick
of a million clocks counting forward.



** In myth, Atlantis was an advanced civilization that succumbed to cataclysmic earthquakes and was eventually lost to the sea.




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If you're going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance!