At Sea
Both cast out to sea, I wonder –
did your ashes ever meet?
It was under the same sun setting,
although years and miles apart.
My grandmother, loosened slowly
into Cardigan Bay under a Hay Moon.
My best friend, spread across a bed
of Pacific seamount, five years before.
Down there, the rocks are hot.
They fracture. Plates upend and falter.
It is a far-off land, alien to our Irish Sea,
with no way for their salt to meet, but still
I imagine their greetings –
a grain from my grandmother’s jaw
grazing dust that used to be my best friend’s knee,
their cinders caught by current,
tumbling together. The loam debris
of a femur, loess of skull dome cupping
one another. What do they talk about?
I hope it’s me. In darkened rooms,
in the land of the living, I click through
learning the names of bones
that have been calcified, atomized, sown.
My inherited orbital bone, the lunate
I used to hold; the incus that only hears
the rush of opposite tides, mandibles open
to taste the salt, the spray, the tears.