Writing

That winter it snowed, but only for a moment. And then it turned to rain, then more rain. Storm water pooled in the basements of houses by the marsh. All the people who lived on hills said thank god we live on hills, and all the people who lived far from the woods said thank god we live far from the woods, though by then no one really believed in god anyway. When the pools of water in the peoples’ basements stilled, wintered, it got very quiet for a while. During blackouts everyone turned toward the windows to make sure they weren’t the only ones. Some people made love with their eyes open under the light the wide sky offered. No one mowed their lawns anymore. The vines grew green to red to crumbling away toward Ram Island. A bird had died in a nest in the tallest leafless tree, and when the wind blew, feathers fell down in their own time and the people tried to catch them in their hands. On the last day of winter, everyone had gone to sleep early. A little warmer, little lamplight, trails of smoke from coals, a street light flickered and then went out. It would just be the two of you. Leaning over the edge of someone’s small boat, tied loosely to the dock. Eyes rocking toward and away from their reflections in the black water. When you see someone upside down you see their throat. The way they swallow, the way their pulse flickers through thin skin. And when the wind blew, the whole thing ever so slightly swayed, the boat and your bodies draped on its frame.

An albatross can fly into the wind without flapping its wings for six years but planes must deconstruct the bodies of birds to learn how to fly. To muscle through it. Staple papers to telephone poles, build dams, and keep lights on through the night. We live on a coast, by a cranberry bog. Early September mornings the fruit floats to the surface, slips off the submerged vine, and into a palm. Puddles appear in the same grooved places each time it rains and hurricanes unravel to a thread: a higher tide, a warmer breeze, an undecided current, and your hand on the small of my back while we walk to the shore. There used to be shade here, before the pitch pine’s canopy grew too wide to hold still, acted as a sail and uprooted itself, the trunk, slick with algae, now stretched from the high tide line to the sandbar like a tongue. Here, the land bends around the water, the way the bone beneath your eyebrow curves into your nose and harbors your eye, the water deep green. We undress and dive in, avoiding a wake. To slip beneath the water like glass in the arm of the land. It’s hard to catch a moth without killing it. It’s hard to get a splinter out on the first try. To know your wingspan. To recognize your breath in a crowd. I want to know the shape of your scalp when, each morning, you rake your fingers through it, before opening your eyes.