viewMāra
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.