the sea and the black

Swimming through the thickness of July (sweat, rippling folds of carbon dioxide, waves of light and sound, the little bits of smog that stick to the cilia in your lungs) seems endless to most.  In my own heart however, I feel the tension of changing seasons.  Just beyond my physical horizon is the redness feared by sailors of old.  The trees resonate my dread.  An 800yr old live oak I climbed a week ago sang to me,

“wind and sleet consistent as sunset

days of slate sky turn to years

nights swallow and solitude consumes

men like leaves wither

dew collects and fog creeps

i am awake while the whole sleeps”

Holding to its bark my eyes cloud and I can see for centuries.  My grip becomes panicked  as I feel the earth tilt and slow it’s rotation.  Here and the hereafter are merging day and night as we move farther from the sun.  Thousands of feet of ice will coat the artifacts in my home.  Eternity will see us floating towards the black, gasses will trail for miles as our orb molds to oval and holds it’s velocity perfectly in vacuum.  While somewhere beyond this sea, I will stand and watch myself through the screen of a digital camera and with an uncanny sense of deja vu, plan my next trip to the ocean.

working my way down

The sand finds it’s way between my toes, just as the silver leafed waves find their way to the edge of the ever-shrinking sand. The wind, contrary to cliche does not cut through me like a knife. Instead it wraps me in a soothing balm. My sunburn retreats, my headache is quelled, and the pain my soul endures is for a moment massaged into abyss by this softest and most iridescent of breezes. Words fail my mind.  Surreal doesn’t begin to describe the eastern rim of this barrier island.  I am swallowed by the vast Atlantic, my whole being taken under, swirling and tumbling.  My mind is swept in a rip tide, smeared on sand and rock, crushed under the the weight of innumerable gallons of salt and water, stretched across a billion years of tides flowing in and out again.  Waves colliding from here to forever vibrate in my core until memories flood my mind. Of rope and wood and grit so close they’d become family,  of tastes and sights so far gone that I fail to recognize form and must simply trust the warmth of fire and brandy that my fellow man had sparked and drank on this very shore before the light bulb and cell phone drove us to seek out such memories. The sand between my toes completes the circuit of my mind and heart.  It pulls the end to the beginning and stretches my ancestor to my heir. Threads compose twine, compose fabric, compose the one endless quilt of sense/emotion/ thought/being.  Heat waves in the dessert force wind to cool my sun stretched face and the one and only moon reflects the light of the one and only sun; myself and those literally half the world away walk beaches by this same light and dwell.