Marsh Hawk Review

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Elizabeth Albrecht

Ocean

1. 

You’re lucky he left his writing, they say. Now he’ll be with you always. Oh really. And where is that?

      Look – I can see we might all return to the Absolute, trailing clouds of Vodka, but come on. When that rogue ocean came to take you, were you, Great! I’ll be a droplet in the ocean, like Faustus when his time came. Still, he’s Faustus in that droplet -- not some random dripping faucet.

      And when the waves came to drown you, the huge ones from Oahu, Maui, that famous beach, Waimea – (the answer being, of course, Why not you?) – weren’t you glad we brought you in?

     At least the first time. The next time you were gone.

2. 

Although, the signs you were still here:

     - A book falls from a shelf – it opens to your name.

     - Someone has carved your initials into the wood on a ferry’s rail;

     - License plates proclaim your date of birth;

     -  That tap tap tapping at my door --

             But even if we believe them

            They’re not signs from heaven

            More from that in-between scene --

            Which you’ll soon be leavin’.

3.   

Still, the memory stored in cells: you’re still alive, still here, in that little blip of Proust and Yogi Berra, where déjà vu and entendu and all the rest of it bring you back, as if time did not exist, and so no space.

       No as if about it!

       You’re in warps and warps and woofs and wormholes, and other unattractively named portals to another universe, a parallel, the 38th  ---  like MacArthur! You shall return!

       Somewhere we’re together, whatever where means, or when, as the song goes; we could be anti-matter, doing stuff. Different stuff. Anti-stuff. Dressed up in ruffs and wigs or space suits.

        “Some things that happened for the first time

        Seem to be happening again.”

          But as some genius pointed out, you can have an eternal return of the first time ever. But you can’t have an eternal return of the second.

        

Air

           

1. 

 

Montauk. The Train, Coming Home.

“Tell me, Sid Fernandez, if you know,” he starts in once. And I continue, now:

      When you were pitching, that night, in breathless air, why, when we turned toward Queens again, passing Shea and graves and changing at Jamaica, hearing the jets come belly across the bay and burst with a breaking roar, as the poet himself wrote — 

 

      Why, on the platform, did I grab onto him and burrow — bury — worry — my head against his belly -- tossing and worrying and worming my head to get in -- as if I wanted to live there?

 

       You, furry mother! – shaggy sea-beast! – I wanted to live inside you, or at any rate, get my head in there, my brains, okay?!

 

        Back where I belonged —

 

         Where I was already!

 

         We were an artificial demarcation.

 

          Schopenhauer tells me so. And Cathy on the moors: “I AM Heathcliff!” And Walt, as well: for every atom of me as good belongs to you.

 

             So. Am I gone, too?

 

            I hear you laughing: “In mourning for your life, sweetie?”

 

 2. 

 

Montauk, August.

It was not the lure of water.  It was our talk that drew us further, out where your thoughts could gather, beyond safety and the sandbar, not touching ground.

 

       We didn’t drown.

        I was the first to catch a wave. Another. The second brought me in.      

 

       But  you --!

 

       Swam back, and grabbed you, arm around you, counselled:  when the first wave leaves you partway, don’t stop to test the bottom --  keep swimming, or you’re lost. The next will come and bring you in to shore.

 

       It did. It brought him to the beach, the shallow water, he was gasping in the spill of shallow water,  gasping, slumped, such gasping, on and on.

 

       His coughing, choking, started from this day.

 

        Two tubes, one for food and one for air. The either/neither. One tube alone for pee and come.

 

        Then endless flu. Then lump, then lungs, then done.

 

       We came back with ashes, added ashes to the water, water moving but not forward, staying put, despite the waves. The water sloshed about and stirred, did not advance.

 The wave is not the water.

 The wave moves through the water.

 The wave pushes through the water, passes on.

 The water stays the same.

 No matter.

      What matters is the ash and sand and what’s beyond the water on the shore, the booming force that moves the water and the talk, the way you walked along the shore, the words you offered to the shore and waves and water, the words composed of shore and water and the force that moves the water, the haunted water, and the struggle to come in.