Enough volume of anything creates a direction.
So many of us gathered in the station
we became a silver streak.

I flowed aboard the train
as a glass of seltzer into a stream,
not realizing the democracy

was one molecule, one vote.
A bucket seat did not quite contain me,
the water in me wising

to the wet in you each jolt,
brain a buoy in the current,
plum in the pool.

Someone gobbled plaice or buttered grouper
while the wingnuts of a jacket lapped my flaps.
It’s not manners that matter but density

in crowds, not class but state,
not fish but their appetite
for education, massing, following, how it

loops and swells, eddies, spools,
performs the same flawless suture
as the ocean on its wounds.

It seeps downhill and machines draw it up.

Helen Guri is the author of Match, published by Coach House Books in 2011 and shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Her poems and essays have been published widely in Canada as well as in the US and Australia. She currently works as a freelance nonfiction editor and advises on poetry acquisitions for Brick Books.

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