OCR Text |
Show Go Love/229 shebang "Daddy?" Lara says, and the whale breathes-she sees us through. Before dark, before we walk the steep muddy hill away from the beach and the gray whale whose eyes have followed us so carefully, the three of us sit on a tremendous log. Lara shakes her bones and Renee's still in dark glasses, her face like her mother's-Meg, way back east. "This is the right place," she says. "I'm glad we're here." "Me, too," Lara says. The air is wet and cold and the wind is northwest, the sun warping over the far curve of sea I say, "Me three." We find our way out in the dark. In sleep we roll near each other against cold and dream. My grief dreams follow patterns. The dead rise up, appear themselves and say it's okay and that they feel for you because of how you hurt. And sometimes they ask of you more than you're willing to commit-life for life, death for death, and sometimes they send out this ache, like a heart about to break And sometimes they turn loose, and its up to you to find the way up the muddy hillside of the psyche, or not to find the way. There we're all on bended knee, on boards lain over floors beside great bloated death, crying out Oh can you hear me? Won't you please, please hear me? Through the star window sewn into our tent roof, the sky spins. How many times have I lay in this dark and replayed my life-the many, many failures and missed chances? The deceits and cruelties and pettiness with which I've marked my time? In mirrors I see the trace of the man who snarled behind the glass. I see. Daylight can be sensed long before it happens. And this is the dark time, real chill in the air, cold through my sleeping bag which is rated for zero, though I've heard those numbers are a lie. Every fourteen seconds, Cape Blanco's lighthouse strobes our tent, lighting my daughter's face |