At 4:16 before morning
a shore built from tumbled
limestone and concrete blocks
faces the pre-dawn
gray lacing a sea-sized lake,
and a shadow cradling the deeper
shaded stone slowly becomes
a seated figure perched further
and not far enough from the spray
catching the dew as it rises
to coat the whole morning
that just now begins its lift, the figure
separating and staying separate
from those movements on the path
above it, the fabric wrapped
around the waist returning
to pink ground prinked with violet,
blue, and red tiny blossoms
stitched with thin, spiral-green stems,
the body inside protected for a moment
by the strangeness of that place
and time from the routines that
even now slide into bedrooms and ruins
and buildings and streets and shore
paths, and unlock the rough daylight,
leaving no room, anymore,
to fill the wide air above the lake,
and the weighted water
touching that air, and the city
just now turning off its lights
and stepping into its blue
outline on the horizon,
no breathing space anywhere
along the endless risen-lit surface
to lie, for a few level and colorless hours,
inside a water-smooth promise that
resurrects, untethered, the generous dark.
Virginia Smith Rice is the author of Vault Dissolve (Canopic Publishing, 2025), When I Wake It Will Be Forever (Sundress Publications, 2014), and Whose House, Whose Playroom (Dancing Girl Press, 2017). Collaborative poems, co-written with Christine Pacyk, appear in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing (Black Lawrence Press, 2018).
