I was driving home when the polar ice caps melted,
leveling first the laundried tenements,
then claiming paneled rec-rooms as water lapped
my bumpers. Pirouetting on one wheel once,
I rode a tin-canned swell above the sharks
that swept in packs upon the sculpted gardens.
I floated on the former continent,
the car aflutter with pigeons bereft of eaves.
Sky-writing planes exhausted fuel with words,
plunged, slipping beneath the Earth’s wet face.
Ships loomed up and stole away like icebergs.
I lost the sight of other vehicles
and have drifted in their memory for days.
I thought to place this note within a bottle,
but the sea is thick with them -- like a crowded room.
The gentle clinks of their collisions carry
like glasses raised to greet the coast of Saturn.
I skim them from the water, drink the dregs
of wine from France, Jamaican rum, juices
fermenting round the butts of cigarettes,
and read of those alive at the time of writing.
There is no rancour in these testaments.
Instead, they praise the tenuous breath, the dappled
heart, the suddenness of ending, made
the purer for lack of hope that they’d be read.
And I, their one confessor, will collect
these paper souls within a book of life,
that we may be remembered as a people
conceived in ink, writ once upon the deep.

Mark Featherstone's poems have appeared (or will soon appear) in Arc, The Mandrake Poetry Review, HMS Beagle, ChiZine, Playing in the Mud? (chapbook anthology from Over the Moon Press) and Let Yourself Go (anthology, Black Moss Press). He lives with his wife and two sons in Montreal West, and is a biologist at McGill University.