Hold Still

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.