Unfamiliar angles
Lying on the
sand, sideways I see pipers and gulls screeching, picking at the congregation
on the edge of the tide. Closing
one eye then the other, watching the horizon jump back and forth. Children
search for stone crabs on the rock jetty. Time, arrow or not, hangs suspended
languid and indolent. The pull of the tide the syrupy smell of kelp and Laver. Why do objects appear to become smaller
as they move farther away? You seemed so tiny as if the world were about to
swallow you up. With my head on the sand,
looking up, you were all legs, your head blotted out the sun, the bright light
forming a crown of golden rays. You were the closest you have ever been to a
goddess. The ocean, such a temperamental god, I never believed it was a woman.
So permeated with violence. Wicked. Its stillness is a mirror, always to our
own minds, as the white clouds are swallowed by the breaking surf. One gull
with a broken leg limped to the edge stabbing for fat, transparent sand bugs.
Dragging its useless leg, trying to avoid the others. The ocean is such an
unreliable god, swallowing up things that it doesn’t care for and even those
things that it holds so dear to its heart. And it pulls, how it pulls!
Something that is right next to you becomes smaller and less significant and harder
to see until it isn’t there any longer. Items that are lost appear
unexpectedly. People cast away parts of themselves inadvertently. We think of context.
We think of matter emitting energy as light waves. We relate to the
amount of uncertainty about an event associated with a given
probability. You are a probability that hovers above me, from this angle the
ocean is still and inanimate, composed, benign, and compassionate.
