Māra
My friend PJ is sitting on the deck of a closed down cabin with me, looking out to sea The deck boards grey and flaking, carpenter ants coming out, an osprey overhead with a fish oriented straight into the wind, as they know how to do— PJ pulls up his shirt easily Like the college athlete he was Green eyes, freckles on his back, long hair, a calm gaze, some sadness He shows a tattoo about his dead father Who drank himself to death
The osprey circles And a plane carrying a rich islander across the sun shades us for a moment— And the waves come in And we talk about relationships, how they are like water— all around us, but we don’t think about them, they shape our life, and we shape them, like water and they are something that will always be there until they aren't, like water. But you can’t go long without water And you can’t see the water for the water And the waves come in.
The edge of a few broken off spruces breaks off where the water meets the edge of a hill, but farther down
The edge of the water that slowly turns this island into rocks, into stones, into pebbles, into sand is lower down
The black ducks, the shearwaters, the loons, the eiders, cormorants and guillemots all laugh and sing Out on the cove below they dive, following fish The ferry goes back and forth, ferrying people and rigs over the crossing And in the sea-distance, two rocks rise: “the sugarloafs”
Everything is named and known But the horizon still glows The air warms, and light refracts And comes down to eye level
The heat of the rough deck The scent of salty air The sound of the waves— We were that day Two people breathing, talking talking about water.