The Nature of Her, who Is, who Was, and Who Shall Be
NARRATOR/WRACK:
We return to the shore, or, maybe it's only me -
Looking for her.
Some dreary November afternoon, it smells like sulfur here
This smell of the wide ocean.
Acrid and sharp in the nose, a kiss bestowed kindly.
I like to sit here, and feel her soft wind
Watch as the small birds dart along the sand
And the sun traces its long path across the sky
Down, down to sink into the water.
So quiet.
Unbidden words come on soft feet into my mouth.
Spoken out, as if preaching, eyes on the horizon
In the sea-foam, all things are level.
Soft sand, hard water, it is not the salt that you smell
It is the rot.
The offal of every bacteria whipped up by waves
Into a protein rich froth
Which feeds those same bodies, which feed the larger bodies
Who nestle into the moldering kelp.
Alien bodies, alien home, a scent which we endure
But which calls us, over and again.
Cartilage, friend! Fold your ears on themselves
Run a tongue over your slimy teeth
Feel where your body remembers
Remembers the body it once was
The one that slithered with jellied bones
Through the weeds, and thought of the sun.
Not as life giver, but enemy which would dry
The moisture from your skin.
Her rot protected you, the sulfurous wrack
And her body fed you with algal slime.
She was you once, too, and you were hers
And your cartilage, your primordial bones
Which came from the sea, and are of the sea
Remember.
Return to intimacy
This is true, maybe.
We carry in our bodies the mark of our births.
Our first births, long past in those forgotten eons.
Coming to the shore is more of a homecoming
Than venturing out on the waves.
As much as we like to say it, we did not come from the ocean.
Not truly.
We came from tidepools
Made grand by the close watching moon.
We came from the stillness
Though we have our roots in the sea,
Clear water bearing witness to the first moment
When a rock gained the will to breath
Those who sought the sun, who grew towards
The open, cool air
First life, born pink, and mewling, and with eyes
Stuck together with placenta
Came from her.
We too come from the shore and return to it.
We too come from her.
The sun kisses the horizon
Pointed foot alighting as gently as a dancer.
And she comes. Have you ever seen her?
Do you know her?
Dancing with the beams of evening light
Leaving soft footprints only ever where
They will be swallowed by the next wave
Which comes scampering up the beach
To lick her feet.
The sky grows embarrassed at the sight of her
Naked as the day being born
See how it blushes, bright, vibrant pink
And turns it's face from the earth, drawing itself back
Back, to follow the sun somewhere
That she is not.
The coward sky, vain and self assured
Can only exist in the light of the sun.
It demands our attention, and covers with its body
All the rest of what is.
But at her smile, her laugh, it slinks away
And reveals the infinite distances beyond.
So in a breathless moment, we stare into the bottomless pit
Into the flickering fire of all creation.
In this evening she dances
She is born into joy, into soft sand
And the squishy feeling of the rotting kelp between her toes.
(Most beloved to her, this wrack, the blackening weed)
For the brief moment she is
She is the kelp, and the sand, and the wind and the waves
The foam from which sprang so many old gods
She dances until the third star appears
And she sinks into that which she is
To be reborn on some other lonely strand.
But for now, she is the music
For this brief while, she counts her rosary
And performs her benediction.
Sermon-like, flowing, easy
She honors those who have come home to die.
For she loves each of her children.
Even on the parts of her, bright shining parts of her
Far away from this dreary day
Untouched by the kelp, shining bright sand
There too she honors the dead.
For what are white sand beaches but
The dead coral, ground to siftable dust?
She loves them all, feels the loss of them
Hears the ache of their last echoing love.
In this moment, she pauses by a whale.
Or, it was a whale, will remain a whale.
Until it ceases to be recognizable as one.
A bead of mist collects on her finger
The whale reflects in it, the image comes clear to her as it
Hangs suspended in the air between its final departure
From her long, dirty nail and her wide wet mouth.
It hits that reeking tongue,
Coating her mouth, it tastes of licorice
Burns her throat as her saliva drips down her chin
Pools in the sand by her feet.
And she shivers from her pelvis to her feet
From shivering scalp to her belly.
The tips of her fingers
Ring with the warmth of hot blood cooling
Down to the ambient temperature.
A whale is a rare treat.
She loves when whales come home to her. So often
They sink, unknown by the sun into the dark abyss.
The below is optional, but recommended. Truly the bottom dwellers are the worst of us.[They turn white, diffuse, and the scavengers find them.
They who could not hack it in the broad day
Who retreated to the edge of being turn to
Consumptive wretches, hemophiliacs and lechers
Delighting in the Bacchus tinted pleasures of dead flesh
Rotting blubber and the dissolving, fat filled bones.
They carve tunnels into the remnants,
Wrapping themselves in their new homes, hard claws
Going click, click, click through the meat
Which gives no resistance, no errant twitch of discomfort.
Girded in flesh, they dance in the solemn dark
Playing flag football with bits of entrail
Dividing the spoils of this life
Parceling it out into their gullets and once gone
Scurrying back into their old hideaways. For when the
Mass of the flesh is water, and the honeycombed bones
Have been dusted and become the sand
The cravens who live in the crushing deep
Cannot bear to remember that above them
Is only miles and miles of smiling, dark water.
And that when they pass, they will lie hidden
Just like the whale.]
Anonymous and unknown.
She does not allow this. Each one gets her special attention
So many of these creatures live their lives on instinct
It is only fair that their death should be intentional
How could a whale, who was born upon her,
Fled to the sea, then to the land, then returned to the callous waves
Be honored by the darkness?
These are creatures who have always orbited the light.
Delving deep, but always breaching the surface.
They do what they must to survive, and in death
So generous.
She calls that the sun shall shine on this spot
Thus she honors the whale.
She hears a muffled cry not a yard away
An old gull and it's friends. But what are they to do
As it twitches its newly broken wing and weeps?
It dies with the whale, having landed on it
To find some meat for itself, but it was too old
Too slow, and another beak struck it
So that it too now follows in the track
The whale-drop left as it ran down the pane of glass
That is to say, her skin, her sand, her flesh.
So she calls that for 40 minutes each day
Clouds will come and shade this spot
The gull shall be spared the unrelenting sun
It will be warm as it dies, full of meat
Even as now it is full of fear and grief.
Or perhaps, it will live and heal here.
Certainly, it’s enemies will find it and it will be
Chased about again – but a broken wing is
Not a broken leg, and there is so much to be had
On a whale. She is no augur of the future,
Save that every creature who walks along her
Carries the seed of death within it that will
Sprout in the fullness of time. This gull carries it too
Rattling about in its hollow bones – but where it will be planted
She cannot say. She can only build the altar
About the rotting corpse.
(Dogs are here, and she feels their raw pleasure
Snapping through the meat, she allows herself one mouthful)
With the gull's life, she honors the whale.
It is not to be eaten which is honor
It is who is eating.
Now, she wanders on
Hearing music made by her children who have left her
Seeking deep currents and high peaks
Who tell her stories when they return
And who she wraps in their baby blanket
Of moldering kelp.
But here, now, upon her live her beloved
Those who did not seek the safety of inhospitable water
Those who do not live high upon the melted bones
Of the very earth, or who fear the crashing power
That comes in every wave.
Here upon her dwell those who see the ebbing tide
And race it, who will dive half to drowning to keep
Their very flesh filled with the stuff of life.
Who will live and breathe in the burning sun,
Scrabbling hard homes in the sand or soft homes
In the rotting kelp.
See this mausoleum: she has placed jellyfish on beds of moss,
Those who with no fins or minds dared to brave the tumultuous currents
Of the coast and were cast ashore as they sought to
Keep their kind alive. She has placed shells in delicate
Broken patterns on the white sand beaches so that
They who in life gird themselves in calcified earth
Might in death guard that same earth with their very bodies
Keeping it safe from being washed away.
She loves each of them, who did not flee their home
For the new climes which grew so enticing over the years.
Or if they did, knew they must return to her
To where they were born to face the world and themselves
And so in death, pay her a visit, and bring her heart to soar.
She should not play favorites, but
It is hard sometimes not to smile a bit too wide.
It is always like this, she walking through the mist
Standing in the swirling fog
And in every moment she is covered in drops
They form rivulets and carve channels into her skin
Round her out until she is smooth on all edges
Until she reflects the waning sun and becomes
One more stone on the beach.
She follows a scrap of fog with her eyes,
With the prickling hairs on her arms too,
Watches the light catch in it, watches the rainbows
Swirl in it, watches so many things at once
Only in the corners of her vision.
Waves soughing softly over and into the sand.
Return to the world, exhale
Third star, she is gone
Green flash in a thousand places, then
Fading, or perhaps passing all at once, she goes.
Is there a difference in the end?
When does the seed disappear and the tree become?
I would know her, if I could, this gardener.
Strange gardener, tending these growing seeds
Passing life sprouting into death
The weaving dappled sun filtering through its leaves
Casting patterns on the ground
More complex and unknowable than you might ever think
If you only ever looked at the seed.
Infinity sprouting from the measurable sum.
Tomorrow she will become again
She is the evening, the dusk
The boundaries between things blurrings
The flat expanse of grey-green sky.
She will return to call things to her
As all things come to her
To become her, twining her limbs with the tree
So subtle in movement, so slow
That you hardly notice when she and the tree
Return together, become one.
A tension, unnoticed, slips
It's the easiest thing in the world
The light fades away
And the night shines clear.
I look over at the whale, the gull watches the sea.
Every creature carries the seed of death,
Except for her. She is the seed.
The song and the piper both.
The one which has been blooming since time began
Whose perpetual branches grow sturdy and wide in the dwindling sun
Until she covers the world entire in her loving shade.
She is the final word, and before that word dissolves
She stares the blinking sun in its face and
Her mouth is the last wet place on Earth.