Shallow Water Navigation

A poem is not made of glass

Like a man, transparent

As tropic reefs

Where bone-bare coral waits

To tear unwary steps

Distorting time and light

In a sea green diffraction

Turn back

Lace elegantly divides

A camellia intaglio

The bird bath spills its oracles

A cataract lens

Moss green, where the wasps

Fiercely reflected

Bend to worship

Another upturned sky

Birds sometimes fly up hill

Trees turn to water, pouring down

The dimensionality of shallowed seas

Has both linear and submarine negotiations

Where forests and the fraught sketched deaths

Of dinosaurs are seldom encountered

But poems exhale slowly

With the tide