Sea Heart
(entada gigas)
Laced through the leaves’ canopy long woven, like the bean stalk of legend, voluminous vine, a harboring trellis of linked pods, you (a seed) are hollow, heart-shaped, grained dark as mahogany and resistant to ruin, until rain washes you out of the forest toward river, then sea for the tolerant glide inside waves in which, nicked by fish, turtles, wind, you’ll sail nowhere on purpose, will be pummeled, and punctuate battering currents like a dash in one tedious sentence, bobbing up through tides until beached, maybe Norway, maybe Florida, exotic surprise. You can float for years. You have that buoyancy. They call you fava de Colon, “Columbus’ bean,” and say it was you that, strewn on Portugal’s shore, a landed echo, led him to think there was more.