GIFT, 2

Lost in the sea's unforgiving blue, I seek you. Before me the day unscrolls its naked scripture: sun, vision's burning field, islands, faint presences crumbling in the distance, water, the fickle immensities life is made constant by. And it strikes me I love the sea because it borders this suffering world and the next: the soul, it is said, travels in a boat from a winding inland river, homing clear-eyed toward the ocean-- which is the bottomless beyond. And I know: here, upon this beach, wash the crushed remains of what was once mortal: bone and kelp, driftwood and tentacle, porous red coral-- keepsakes life leaves behind before dissolving back to brine. I am home here, then, whom the world never loved, and from its town edges I can almost see it all end: an onrushing tide, a radiant sea-swell sweeping away all appearance, gentle eddies whittling the self till it is no longer even sand. I think of you landlocked and lost in another element-- your body. The sea teaches me love is a wish not for safety but for destruction. I am not ashamed to admit it: I love you the way water loves. Which is to say I wish the world were through with you, so you could return to me ravaged, upon this shore: a shell held tight inside my palm.

-- J. Neil Garcia --