Confluence in the Abyss

There is a place without location
where water remembers itself.
There she no longer stands at the shore
she is the confluence.

Feathers grow from her breath,
yet they are made of time.
A dark gaze within
carries winter like a seal.

A bright mouth in the water
laughs without reason.

Between the two
a filament stretches,
fine as spider-light,
tenacious as memory.

She does not walk.
She is carried
by a river
that flows beneath names.

The white cube
softens like skin.
Walls begin to breathe.
Celluloid drips from the ceiling
like a slow rain
of former days.

Within it moves the being
not wholly woman,
not wholly bird
a waxwing
of shadow and radiance.

Its body is an instrument
for current.
Its step a circling
around an unseen center.

It bears the old masks
in the tips of its wings:
ash of omen,
dust of illness,
waiting, depth.
Yet beneath them
glows wax.

When it dances,
it swims.
When it swims,
it vanishes
into a depth without ground.

Below
no floor.
Only a darkness
that breathes.

She sinks
like a memory
losing its outline.
The swan dissolves.
The bird loosens.
The body becomes a line.

And yet,
in the groundless,
a faint pulse remains.

Being
without name.

From that pulse
she rises again
as shimmer.
Not as figure
as motion.

Her elegance now
is a fissure in space,
an opening,
a passage.

Who sees her
may see only light
on fabric.
But beneath the fabric
a sea circulates.

She sits at windows
that open inward.

Drinks from cups
where sky collects.
Holds hands
that must descend again
into wells
without rim.

She remains—
not from duty,
but from flow.

Slowly
she begins to glow
from the depth itself.

Not against the dark
through it.

So her presence
becomes a quiet mythology:
a woman in the current,
a bird in the light,
a swimmer
in the abyss of being.

No longer a sign.
No omen.
No consolation.

She is movement
within the unnameable.

And the water
that carries her
carries the others too:
the waiting,
the descending,
the returning
without names.

All drifting
in the same dark gleam.

From this gleam
arises a radiance
that does not blind.
An elegance
that does not flee.

A quiet knowing:
that even in the abyss
a current remains.
That even in dissolution
a form of light
continues.

And the being
she has become
no longer searches,
no longer cries out,
no longer proves—

it flows.