the grieving married
couple get ready for bed
They stood, their
clothes flapping
softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust.
The bones of seabirds.
At the tide
line a woven mat of
weeds
and the ribs of fishes
in their millions stretching
along the shore as far
as the eye could see
like an isocline of
death.
One vast salt sepulcher. Senseless.
Senseless.
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
the words he’ll never read keep coming anyway
a sea whose only knowing is push and pull
push and pull a man going in
to a woman a woman going into a woman
going into a man going into a man. but not like that.
ok maybe like that.
maybe a little.
but only because of the salt.
decide its only because of the salt. and maybe
the wind.
and maybe,
because winds never stop talking,
maybe even because it never stops
singing he once put his mouth against a drain-
spout so retched with detritus it’s almost ancient
Hebrew, a gurgle of atonement,
something he’d want to put his mouth against
again and again, the drainpipe draining
down his throat in words and words and words
that keep
coming up her spine where he used to be
his chest against it sometimes or from behind
the way he’d sneak up and invite himself
in and she never said no because maybe
one day he’d be right where he is now and she’d
be right
where she is now and no one would
want to touch her no one would want
or maybe even care to hear the faint
radio of a letter rubbing against another
letter
and another and then space space space
as wide as a blank page in a book
as bound as the spine of that book
as generous and needed as consensual
sex the words he’d never read never see
never hear she mouths them anyway she spits
them she makes tea she bakes cakes and meat
with them and eats and drinks and waits
at the tide clock not ever looking not needing
to
he having gone out and she after
so many other shes and hes (though never
as good as him and never as ready)
gets ready too gets ready after all these years
a thin widow
