MARE COGNITUM Lemon moon upon Azores and finbacks body harmonized to pitch and yaw sleeping above deck beside your fellow sailors now that the war is over now that you have been fired upon from a castle and buried a man at sea chased rebs for three years along the ancient gyres coald ship coald ship coald ship /// Lemon moon above the 42nd parallel An ocean away from the Market Street mansion where you hid your initials in plaster When I look at your heavens the work of your fingers the moon and stars which you have set in place Here is the sea vast and spacious teeming with creatures beyond number Every living creature that moves with which water swarms /// Sea of nectar Sea of fecundity Sea that is known to me as fed by the waters of the Deep and the Haw of the Little and the South and the Black of the Zamfara and the Benue of the Mersey and the Clwyd of the Tâmega and the Guadalquivir of the Nashua and the Charles of the nameless brook beyond my window doing its own ageless part to combine and recombine to become known and unknown /// Lemon moon, Atavus, coald ship ever in orbit, you who declared yourself in the rain at the foot of Orange Street when I look at the work of your fingers on the pages with which water swarms and salts and suffuses the moon and stars which you have set in place for us, O father here within the hull of my ribs is the sea of nectar the sea of fecundity the sea that now can never be unknown here you are home.
MICHAEL METIVIER

About Michael Metivier
Michael Metivier is an editor, writer, and musician. His work has appeared recently in Moist, EcoTheo Review, Green Mountains Review, and Northern Woodlands Magazine, and is forthcoming in Bennington Review and Kenyon Review. A split chapbook with poet Erín Moure is forthcoming in spring 2022. He lives with wife and daughters in Vermont. Website: michaelmetivier.com