Multo.com :: Visual Magic

Sea People

Sestina asks, “What is a wave?”
Thirsty sharks circling and drowning men panicking
They know intimately its shape and size and power
Grandmother, in front of the house
Like an old grouper – giant, gray and smiling
To Sestina, she seemed ancient, her face an almanac
But little moons fall down like tears
The waves of the seasons crashing in her eyes
Her skin like dunes banked against each other
Deep crevices spreading in between
Her equinotical tears change from tiny streams to seas
Choked with black and blue
Never a grouper, thinks Grandmother
Sestina is porpoises, thin, silver and creaseless
Her eyes glimmer blue in the whites
Like waves crashing on the shore
Bologna had no sea, only sun
Not far to the sea
Sestina would soon go to her father, Joseph
Who swam like a giant fish in water
And walked like a drowning man on land
Thoughts between these two never mention a mother
And this unthought, spreading it travels between these two
Until, like a grain left in water, it expands and takes all the space
The mother, unmentioned, is remembered, bloody and struggling
Sestina had a brother, born as small as a minnow, as pale as the sand
The rumor is mermen or dead sailors
The seed is unnatural
Grandmother and Sestina know it was the waves
Joseph owed a life to the sea and like Ulysses
Mocked its power
Her mother rarely swam
The debt, unpaid
Seas are angry and never forget
Sometimes sharks circle, on command attack
Seven sisters float on its surface yet never dive
Mother can’t swim
A story untold
Sestina starts to hurt and Grandmother starts to crumble
The dunes washing down her face
Age makes panic too tiring
Children never see days without it
Joseph will come soon walking out of the sea
Eyes blind without salt, skin puckered and sticky
He will smell like seaweed and shrimp
In his mouth, he will carry a pearl
Each time Sestina starts with hate
Then takes his hand and carries him home
A child like that, Grandmother thinks, is a Venus destroyed
Her chance with the sea has been used by a father
Lost by a mother and lays bound at the bottom of the sea
With a brother, wrapped in communion cloth and seaweed
Ah, the time, the days
Men will never go out on boats
Unless they can be towed safely back to shore
Quite a different notion
The sea can’t comprehend
Not one skiff to set upon a wave
Or one dead to feed on
The fish wonder where man has gone
Bologna, Sestina hums, no sea in Bologna
No salt in the air
The sun shines on trees and the music is leaves
Not seas
Grandmother sees him mounting the dunes, then the road
Eyes like deep water stare at nothing
Joseph approaches
Sestina tastes quinine
Grandmother smells gasoline
He did not swim, she thinks
He came on a boat
For the first time, hope or maybe relief
Joseph is content in his debt to the sea
Half a family on land
Half a family buried at sea
Sestina cocks her head; something is not right
He is not wet; he had dry clothes on
He did not visit with mother or brother
At a grave stone at the bottom of the sea
Seven years have passed
The moon reflects on glass
A shape mounts the hill
On his left, flowing and shimmering like a goldfish
A woman, not ebony like mother, but golden
Hair like seafoam, tight spirals massed in a net on her head
Thin driftwood looking as if she would break
Father pauses, turns to hold her hand
Pulls her up over the dunes
Shakes sand from her shoes and,
First lifting her high, sets her on the road
Grandmother nods to the winds, her daughter forgotten
Sestina looks at the ground and tries to look serious
As much as an eight-year-old can
Life begins again
Scales no longer blind Father
At least not the old black ones
The woman from New York has golden scales
Father has brought home a wife.

Oct. 15, 1998