The silver-mercury train pierces night with fleeting clarity.
Write this down.
Dump the other notebooks you dug up in the woods (after days of torrential rains) this morning when night hadn’t yet given over (so no one would know)–into the sea.
Even the permanent metallic markers (you have so come to love): silver-blue, silver, silver-seafoam green, and silver-lilac—will blur into swirls of color in the salt water (the way blood swirls pink when the shark gets its prey)–before the narrow rule and graph paper pages are pummeled by high, rip, and neap tides.
No one else can understand your pilgrimage here. They all have their own.
Row out past the reefs to witness the schools of sardines shoaling. One direction. Then another. Though it makes you jealous. Their orchestration. That they are not alone.
Set the dead robin fish free. With that prayer you memorized. But now you are nervous and can’t remember the middle section. Improvise. Something meaningful, profound. Or just sing that lullaby your father sang to you (before he said his prayers on his knees by his bed) all those years ago.
The seagulls’ cries will pierce with their hunger. Swooping for the silver flickers in turquoise and aquamarine.
If you scream here or wail like a wild animal, no one will hear.
Try not to think so much. Become that painting in blues, greens, yellows, and whites—sunlight through clear, deep waters.
But your thoughts take off in diverse directions– galloping like the wild horses left on the shore by pirates five hundred years ago. They surge the sea-spray and the waves. Brown and olive seaweed caught in the chaos of their manes and hooves.
Think gather. Sum. Not separate, perforate, riven.
Try not to feel sorry for yourself. Embrace the porcupine of destiny’s whims written on the ancient map.
Laugh during the requisite sobbing.
Tell no one.
Fascinating, how you observe the tides, oceanic, coming in and out, while my perspective is always about streams and rivers, struggling toward lakes. We both expound, from time to time on the breaking news of the moment, that water is wet.
I will not tell anyone, except you… Always tell you.
Yes. I watched A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT again last night and thought of all my friends in Montana and other parts of the country like you in Tennessee away from the sea and toward rivers. I think most of us gravitate toward water and its calming effect on us and our own ancient currents or tides. Thank you for reading my poetry always–and for telling me everything.