The Swell of the Sea

Atop the stairs stood this image. Ghost from beginnings, reminder of now. Baggy pants, hair in a hand knit beanie, the color of exploding yarn. At the very top, later she would show me, a burned out star, fallen from the heavens. A rock as black as the void, perforated a million times with the heat of it’s unfathomable journey. Just as I remembered her, this wandering poet, philosopher; a lamp without shade.

The library was closing, or just nearly, my books not yet found, I mounted the steps to ascend to the higher levels of knowledge. There above me stood this old friend. Yes old friend, though neither old nor particularly close to me. Just as I remembered her. How had time folded so that one moment lead to the next, though a thousand lay between?

“Hello.” She said.

“Hello.” I said.

• • •

Dusk settled in the forest, nestled into cuddled dark approaching. A golden hour filtered through a mesh haze of grey. Clouds too long visitors, delayed. Damp ocean salt breeze, the smell: crab shell abandoned, seaweed entwined. Whispers from the West, far over the horizon, kissed us on the ears. Climbing the hill, the tree limbs grasped, twisted, begged, yearned. Atop the hill stoics, trees too, like priests, tall, stiff, straight, righteous, refused to lend a hand. Beneath the cliffs, fat seals bathed in the retreating sunlight. Pups ducked the waves of the rising tide, watched two indiscreet lovers caressing on the secluded shore, called to them, ”what are you doing there? Why don’t you come in the water and play?” Naive as he was, he didn’t realize that the two could not speak seal. The two, pausing from their lover’s gaze, looked out to sea and noticed the pup watching them and asked, “What is it doing? Why is it watching us?”

A tall, thin, and aging photographer walking through the half enchanted forest at dusk crossed paths with a young couple walking in the opposite direction. It happened that they all stopped and began to converse; the three of them beneath the righteous boughs of those stoics on the hilltop. The aging photographer unzipped his bag and took out an odd device, a large, dark colored beetle-shell of textured plastic and tin. “Seen one of these before?” He brought its mouth to his eye and pressed down the horn on its head. It moaned mechanical and shed its skin; a thin, flat, white square that began slowly to change colors before their eyes. The aging photographer took it flat on his palm and pressed it to his stomach. When a minute or so later he presented it to the couple, they saw that a magical transformation had taken place on this beetle’s skin. Where there once was only white, now was a faded but most certain image. An image of them as they were. “It’s us, just like we are now,” they both said. The aging photographer smiled and shook his head. “This picture was taken thirty years ago, we had not yet met.” He placed the image in his breast pocket and continued down the path.

• • •

On second hand couches, in a second hand store, I conversed with the girl with the star above her head. We shared stories and speculations until the voice in the loudspeaker announced that the store was closing. She handed me a green suitcase that she had brought, that she had slept on, sat on, stood on. Carried from one end of the US to the other. As she exited the building, she turned and called out my name above the crowd. “Have fun!” And she was gone. I opened the green suitcase and inside, asleep, but full of life, lay a library of poems.