THE LONELY WHITE WOLF

Smoke finds the lamp and wraps in a shawl of grey,

fingers of dusk knitting around a tired flame.

It tastes the hulls of ships that sank before language,

licking names from timbers, learning the salt of silence.

We have always been here, keeping time in a jar —

murmurs caught like moths, wings powdered with memory.

The lid is a moon; sometimes it rattles with old storms,

sometimes it lets a slow breath of midnight escape.

Outside, the ocean writes a new coastline in foam,

an eraser hand tracing and untracing the shore.

Waves fold secrets into kelp and bone, then tuck them away;

the horizon redraws itself with each indifferent tide.

In the lamplight, the shawl shivers, revealing small stars

stitched into the grey where burnt paper once lay.

Smoke remembers the taste of bell and rope and prayer,

and how, beneath language, the deep keeps its own ledger.