Today's poem is Shatter Zone, Mount Desert Island by Todd McKinley. It is read by Julia Bouwsma.
Shatter Zone, Mount Desert Island
shatter zone: an area where the intrusion of magma sent splinters of older, country rock into younger granite. This country rock is broken into fragments, or "breccia."
We could bring a picnic basket
and walk down the shore:
do nothing but drink or
sit wordless while
throwing stones into the surf
where the ocean retreats
and reveals rock smoothed by tides.
Each one we toss ricochets
off these cobbles exposed.
We find a place in the sun,
on newer bedrock,
more ancient than we will ever become;
Side by side we let silence
fill empty spaces
as sea presses between each stone,
resisting
a world rushing to return us,
into a tide washing away our desires
once solid, secure
now folded one into another
to form something new...
We watch the lines
where sky and sea blend
at the horizon,
where waves crash on stone
foaming rivulets of susurrations,
where the spruce and fir cling
to granite ledges:
these borders we wonder
how to cross
while returning whole...
And so we cradle such dreams
beyond the boundaries of time
and whisper such secrets
to ourselves
so the wind and the waves
cannot drop these remnants
of us into
the shatter zone.