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Show Go Love/234 gathered eggs from white cliffsides The wife had missed her home back in Ireland, and when he died, this thirty-year lighthouse operator, she'd left him here, set his stone on the hill alcove facing Ireland. She'd walked away from her husband's grave and gone by ship across the Atlantic and never come back, even though the sons and daughters are buried at their father's feet. I have not cried since the first morning, not for Mama and not for me. Girlish voices singsong behind me The ocean heaves and the sky's laced with east moving stratocumuli and cirrus The new moon's out, the old moon in its arms. The gray tacks not forty yards out. In the corner of my eye, Lara and Renee drag driftwood into a heap, the summer sun straight over our heads, the day full ahead. We're at the edge of a new world-this much seems true-dragging the freight of our lifetimes The wind is right this second and I smell the sea lion, a big cow, four-hundred pounds maybe, rotting up beyond the sand mountain. Lara and Renee are fashioning the driftwood into a makeshift shelter. The smell is unmistakable, what happens to flesh and blood. I understand the association of flowers and death, how the two go hand in hand, through where prayer originates is a great mystery I don't know when I fell in love with my mother Maybe the body remembers with intense nostalgia its first home, so our powerful attraction to see and swim in oceans, to gather fishes and shells and weeds offered up, in dangerous waters. The undertow of our dreams drowns us. From those waters came our kind. Sea water is suitable, so I've read, for pumping into a human's veins in place of blood, should none be on hand. Love of water is love of self-the trail our tears make, ancient springs where all our initials are carved and sweet water flows between fissures in the walls of time: water of life, water of death. A mountain of sand has blown up against one sheer cliff just to the south of the white cape Coarse, the sand is the color of the stone though it holds heat and can be climbed to the summit |
