Between Black and White

What is it you are becoming, black bird rising from the body of a fish,
or fish taking form beneath the wing, swimming upward through the dark?

I look at you and cannot decide which world I entered first. Above, the birds
seem certain of their direction, each one carrying its blackness toward the sky.

Below, the fish have found another kind of sky, a depth where fins replace wings and every creature moves toward the same unseen distance. Yet neither world is whole.

Your birds are made from what the fish surrender. Your fish are made from what the birds leave behind. Between them, white narrows until water becomes feather,

feather becomes scale, scale becomes wing, and the eye loses its place between
one creature and the next. How long can a bird remain a bird before becoming water?

How long can a fish remain a fish before the empty space claims it for flight?
You have made neither creature complete. Each depends upon the disappearance of another.

I wonder about the white you left between them. Was it emptiness when you began, or did you know that absence could carry more life than either flock or school?

I keep looking for the instant of change, the hidden hinge where swimming becomes flight, but your woodcut refuses to give it to me. The birds will not descend. The fish will not rise.

They remain forever at the edge of becoming, each one carrying the other inside it, while the white between them keeps vanishing, becoming everything I cannot see.

Author's Note:

I’m including this brief author’s note for readers who may be less familiar with ekphrasis poetry. For the Negative Space Challenge, I chose to respond to M.C. Escher’s Sky and Water I through an ekphrasis poem, focusing on the negative space between the birds and fish and how each form emerges from the other.