The Sea

When I would trace my fingertips along the furtive curves of the coast, I would each time imagine it as your path. Through those hills, far from the old capitals and their rot. Dissapearing there, perhaps, into the vast lush hinterland. I've always felt that's where the greatest power lays still, in those inbetweens, where the forest run into the sea. Those starless nights when I would find you there, curtains adrift, your eyes wandering out to sea, bidding the tide take you with it; you'd whisper to me: "the lights of the buoys, the second city in the waves, oh how they dance Lucy, oh to walk the streets of that second city, to see it in waking dream." I'd wrapped your hand in mine until those waves subsided, until the dawn swallowed that second city, I bade it never return. Still I'd looked to your eyes once, curiously, innocently. I saw no lights Nikki, no buoys upon a calming sea. Only black waves, rolling thunder; and I saw love, oh such love. I think it foolish now, but I admit that my first instinct had been one of jealousy, but somehow I doubt you noticed the way I shifted beside you, how I'd turned away. There was a storm rolling in. It took me a long time to view that vast ocean as you did, as more than destruction. As more than one to be revered, feared perhaps, but always revered moreso. Oh the way it tears at the land, such power, such patience. But that's not it, is it? I stand between great bluffs and capes and I have never felt more loved, it embraces me, it waits for me. Oh how it loves me Nikki. These islands, what are they but mountains and rivers? Their tithe in stone and quartz and damp earth, ours in blood and hate and crimson hope. It takes it all Nikki, for us, not from us. I'm taking the car tonight, as you had. i'm tracing a route deep inland, to those great penitent mountains, to those deep forests and the secrets they hold. Do you remember, still, when we'd stayed in that cabin to see the stars again? You'd said, in whispered tones, as if the trees may overhear. "I can still hear the sea." I hadn't heard it then. I hear it now, louder, ever louder, as I pass town after town, each emptier than the last, each more sunken in its foundations, each more alive. As I trace the tributaries to their roots. Where the sea leaks from stone. I hear it. Black waves, rolling thunder We are each rivers, what can we do but run without fear or hesitation into its arms.