Sea Level at the 8th Parallel North
Remember when snow fell on the beach?
We built a hasty dyke of stone and mud,
somehow seeking to Canute the tide
whilst wet-rusted sand mingled with whiteness:
you took my hand and dared me naked.
Trusting this new sleet-grain softness
we angled backwards, let go of our bodies –
angels on the shore, twin silhouettes
darkened by quick warm skin-melt.
But still the waters swelled and rose
until our existence was merely an image,
a record of our momentary shapes
painted by dying light on a cave wall,
here, where it all began.
‘This world rests on another world’, you said.
‘But what does that world rest on?’
‘Another world.’
‘And on what does that world rest?’
‘Another world.’
‘So it is worlds all the way down?’
‘It is worlds…all the way down.’
Ted Eames, 2019