The Draft
All memories ignite, he says, recalling
the odor of accelerants and charred
friends. Yesterday I walked to the sea
and looking into its deep crush
sensed something unseen washing
out, between tides and a shell-cut foot,
sand and the gull’s drift, or the early names
I assign to faces. This is not sadness.
Somewhere the called numbers meet.
“The Draft” first appeared in Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art.
O at the Edges 
This resonates – “gone” relative to current dimension – anyone’s essence never not somewhere – though I may not be able to touch them bodily, I sense they are “out there”. I am not afraid of my own eventual pull from this realm into another – re-mingling with those previously departed. Although I also suspect the next is no more permanent than the current – that some I’d love to meet up with again will have already left for yet another dimension. Perhaps this is all a party game to ensure we continually meet new souls thus continually expand our own? Perhaps we are all parts of a bigger universal soul?
Nicely read. Probably you were thinking of ones drafted into military. Thanks for leaving mental wiggle space to interpret beyond specifics.
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I’ve long been reconciled to my impermanence! I hope we’re all part of a universal soul.
The initial impulse was the military draft, but that led to other questions, as these things tend to do. 🙂
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I especially like the line “looking into its deep crush”, the deep crush of the sea. The word ‘crush’ here has such musicality in relation to the other words in the poem.
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Thank you, Lola. By the way, I loved your contribution to The Larger Geometry!
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Thank you! I was very glad to be included in that project.
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The haunting bit is the “early names I assign to faces.” I wasn’t sure why that part kept calling me back, but now I think it might be a sneaky structural thing. Each ideas is circumscribed by sentence boundaries, except for that clause, the “or” conjunction of alternative pointing to a perpendicular flow, or draft, away from the plane of the poem. A little scratch on the surface of this rich poem, anyway 😊
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I seem to rely on that perpendicularity quite often. 🙂
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A residual benefit of a the psychedelic habits of youth. (At least, that would be the explanation in my case.)
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Ha! I’m just naturally skewed in that direction.
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