The Pub

Archipelago

Jeff Smith

Our words, sand
trailed through a house,
settled the lonely span
between two bodies
of fractured land,
making waves and the sea’s
haunting depth familiar.
Stuttered sentences, a pause

of breath, uncertainty
mixed with history,
harbored between us
an isle of peaks — verdant,
unhewn, rising.

Gradually our diction
became a strip of standing
stones, held as rock brought
into place by Earth’s
weight, gravity greater
than ourselves, these once lonely
bodies of land.