| A Realization of Waters | |
| Todd Keith | |
Beginning is hard. I read once of a child lost gone caving. I was lost to the pressures of time, feeding in layers on pain, conjoined with your loss in dark landscapes and foreign lands Only now I can tell this story to you, if you hear my words. A card you sent, Matisse’s “The Moroccans.” What you wrote lingers, bleeding into a dream of you— forgotten are words, but I remember the glide of water echoing in subterranean walls, entering crevice and corner drawn by gravity, down, always down. Water, voice of life, created by man and woman. It sickens to nausea, filling you, begging release, until release comes. I fled the sound. Alone, no language, hearing without understanding. On coastal highlands amid floating cries of gulls warm grasses whisper quiet. Cliffs, Atlantic dreams— the child alone, tenuously holding by thread, waking in night sealed eternal. Taken by waves it drifts against tide until morning calm, rushing the shore, arms empty save arbitrary gifts of sea. The last time we met you asked me to leave. Speak in water, pulsing my ears, not these words. Seek heart-currents of reason and pain. Fluids, minerals, nutrients join swirling the appetite of loss and confusion over the sea sent between us. At home I would call you this Sunday morning but whatever passed between us is gone, maybe never was. It ceased, receding to the source, lost underground waiting to awaken in you one day. A coming realization of waters, of seadrift, flotsam and lost cries of gulls will surface. I feel this, though there is no water between us now. |