One One-Thousand

When I was five a little god’s
crashed shell washed up
at my feet
     on an empty beach. The broken home,
nothing to hear, nothing to say, rocked
with the wave.

In the dark something sings our name
reverberating. The deaths of parents, friends,
or the madman the TV showed shot down, all ripple
outward from a thrown rock—

                         Daddy skipped
stones he chose
     on the silent face of the sea. They
fell in; the face was blind, reflected cloud, and then
I heard thunder

as the eight thousand ribs
     of Ouroboros Self-Devourer rattled overhead.

Lightsey Darst