The ways the ocean sounds

It feels different the first time you hear it when you just arrive...the syncopation of the ocean, it is more of a jazz tune as it ebbs and it flows...

It acclimates you...it immerses you in the wind, the scent of the sea, the sand...the ocean is unchanged.  It is exactly, almost, as to when it was first formed.  What you see now is what has been seen for ages....ageless in its gaze.

It is complicated in colors...that change beneath full sun or darkening storms.  The blues become browns and greens...at night it reflects whatever is lucky enough to stand over it.

The ocean is sinew, muscular and molding...it cares not a whit if you join it.

It purrs with low tide and exults at high.  It lets the moon set its mood.

It strokes the sand like a lover, pulling on it, streaming against it, sliding down past the slight incline the way you clutch clothing and gently remove it.

It quarrels against you, nudging you.  It gathers at your knees and moves past you.

I hear such sounds as I remember the ocean...I remember it as complicated patterns and beautiful landscapes...picturesque mornings and indescribable evenings.  

I remember no such equal.  I remember nothing even close.

I remember an ocean and I immediately think of you.

Sorrows

Have another drink...at least one before you go.

A pause...then a no.  No, it wouldn't be appropriate.

There's nothing appropriate at this point...it's well past that.

I know.

So it may as well be a toast...a drink... let's commiserate.  Let's imbue our senses with liquid courage.

I don't need courage now...

I know.

What do you need?

I don't know...it's a little confusing.  It's hard to balance.  It's hard.

Things that are great usually are.  That is what makes them great.

(Silence)

I envy the blind.

What?

I am a bit envious of those who cannot see...they have to rely on touch...the spoken word.  The scent.

Why would you think that.

Because the image of you is forever imprinted on me.  I may never touch you again, never smell you again...never hear you.  But goddamn have I seen you.

And is that a bad thing?

Only if you never appear again.

(silence)

Mostly When It Rains

Not because of nothing...but it just feels different.

There is the usual missing...the empty bin feeling of something that is gone.

The polite pull of something that has stranded, moved away.  A phone picked up...set back down.

Perhaps it is the washing away, a cleansing...removing.  There is the fresh scrubbed sky, the ground is awash in sparkles and the air is perfect.

There may even be a rainbow, a brief fluorescent reminder of beauty against a storm.

But none of that really matters.

The sky could be fucking purple, a gorgeous glaze that is remarkably unique, unseen ever and like an alien landscape it would be captivating in its presence...

But in that color reflected afternoon, I wouldn't care.

Soaked, still wet from the downpour and likely cold in the clothes, I know that mostly I'd be empty.  I'd be solo.

I'd be wooden.

I'd be stone.

There would still be a heartbeat, blood flowing through veins...clinically alive, lovingly dead.

Listening to the last drops still falling from trees, from eaves of houses, watching the storm slowly move away...stranding me even further, leaving me who was once alone even lonelier.

Autumn

Somewhere, someone was burning leaves...the distinct scent, a delicious aroma, a reminder, a harbinger of cooler nights and graying days.

Trees reluctantly unclenching their leaves, like a lover saying goodbye, a slip and a spiral downwards to join just the other bits and pieces of them that they used to own.

He walked along the trees where the leaves had just barely covered the road...hiding the dark cement that was rippled with ruts and coated them in a gorgeous weave of colors.

She had covered up his holes as well, his faults and his blemishes that stained him.  She gathered and layered over him, her bright and eye-catching parts blotting out his ruts, his uneven patches.  He laid beneath her, letting her envelope him, letting her scent linger on him, her gentle weight just barely indent him.

She made him smooth, she made him plausible.  She masked him with her arms extended and drew him in.  She bound him, there were no wounds that could emerge.

And at night, with a crisp air that felt like a slight stab when sharply inhaled, she warmed and invited.  She reflected blood moons and harvest nights.  She dabbed frost on in the morning, and sometimes a pale sun would gently melt it, her clinging against him taking a more intimate shape.

He thought of this as he walked, sometimes the leaves crunching under him and splintering into pieces.  He smelled the scent of burning leaves, and it reminded him of her perfume.

He had many reminders...but this was one of his favorites.

There is no Last Ferry

He always tried to time his departures when you could just barely make out the Church Tower at Jamestown...a sight he had seen in his visits but still was a bit haunting....300 year old stones assembled for people to worship.  He knew something about worship...but for him it was more in the form of a person and not a building.

He was on the 2nd deck observation deck, the ferry trailing a bit of a muddy wake as the recent storms had churned the river and the late afternoon-almost evening air had a slight chill like it was starting to sense Autumn.  He felt the beginning of some ache like he always did at this point...going past Glass House, starting to move into the deeper water.  

He began to miss her the moment she turned.  While she was still in his view he started to sense the brief splintering of her presence and like a spill he started to feel an emptiness starting to spread.

It tended to peak when he could see the Church tower, which is why he always departed in a bit of the twilight.  And it just felt like a reminder...of things that can endure.  Things that can stand through bits of time.  Long times.

It sometimes made him feel better, sometimes it didn't.  When she was with him his eyes scoured her, recording memories of her face, her look.  He wanted to pull her inside of him, to capture her in her perfect state and preserve it.  He tried to remember that she made the length of time irrelevant, that regardless of how long she was there it was never long enough.  

And he couldn't quite remember how she looked because each time he saw her after an absence she was exactly prettier than before...and perhaps that was the absence and his memory colliding but he always noticed something new...there was always something fresh.  

Which made the departures even more maddening.  

Soon the faint outline of the Church Tower faded against the blackening backdrop of trees and the rest of Virginia.  It felt like he had just closed his eyes.

He furiously tried to remember exactly what she looked like...how she looked like to him.

What Constitutes Beauty

It wasn't a question, rather it was a declarative.

Beauty is generally seen in presence...I invoke it in absence.  I love the beautiful wake you leave behind in a departure...a leaving.  Being present, being in front of me, the slight rise of your breathing and the scent of a lotion and then...then nothing.  But not nothing.  An impression.  A fingerprint.  But left somewhere upon me indelibly.

The velcro-like pull as you walk away.

It's like the need for a drink and finding only empty bottles.

It is a draw.  It is a kiss at prom.  It is a heart rate increase.  It is comfort.

There is a reason we kiss with our eyes closed...to feel the part of another that is best imagined.  Best left to the colors of the brain, and letting our mouths decide direction.  Our arms to figure out connection.

Beauty is felt.  Not seen.

You are quite beautiful...to the eye, and to the scene and to the world.

But you are what is quite frankly the substance of beauty when you are not seen, except perhaps in the bright tug of a memory.

Circles

At times she was a warm iron, her heat emanating from deep within.

But at times he felt she had sadness, balloons within her that he could sometimes prick with a comment, and it would slowly empty and she would be rid of it.  For a moment.

Like now, on the porch as an evening devolved into a muddy mixture of storm clouds and darkness.  Ugly colors in a humid evening.

I just wanted you to know that it is in these...these little brief moments that I feel like I am inside of you...inside of your mind and I'm simply merely trying to calm it.

He announced it as she sat behind him...he on the porch stairs with a drink in his hand.  His comment had been with his bourbon outstretched in front of him, gesturing that the horizon was collapsed into a tiny pocket of this small house in the southern county.

Her voice, usually in reactions to his comments, was quiet.

I know.  I know I'm not able to share whatever you call it...you and your writer words.  

He turned to her, a shape in the evening...legs together and tapering up to her hair and her face.  It was the worst lighting...in a bright space her eyes were such toffee colors against an angled face.  It was something a bit mesmerizing while expressive.  Here, in the shadows of a night about to commence he couldn't read her.

I don't need you to share.  

I think you do.  I think you need to hear it.

He nodded slightly, knowing she couldn't see it.  But he knew that she could strip him like a sapling, carving him in layers and keeping bits of him to collect and preserve.  He couldn't do that to her...she was like an iron that required him to warm her...to warm her from the inside and perhaps maybe warm her to the point where she exposed herself a little bit.

I don't necessarily need to hear it.  I guess I just need to feel it.  And unfortunately I probably need to see it to feel it.  And that requires being here.  He said this as he mounted the steps and walked briefly in front of her.  She had a slight habit of murmuring when she wanted to say something but kept it closed inside of her.  So he started again:

But here's the thing.  I am slowly realizing that I don't need to be here either.  So long as I know you're here...so long as I know you're somewhere...some place.  Just knowing that you're in an evening and so am I...I'm learning that even that small common piece is enough for me.

Meaning what? she said.

Meaning...I don't know...it's like a presence.  A prayer.  It's the sense that you are there...that you and I are maybe thinking the same thing despite distance.  I don't know.  It's a bit crazy.  But I sense you.  I sense your presence.  I feel the weight of you.  Like your walk, your driving in a car to work...I feel it.  I know you're there.  

Why the prayer comment?

Because you pray for something you want.  Sometimes you pray for something you need...I don't know. Perhaps I need you.  I definitely want you.  It, at times, is hard to tell which.

Quiet in an evening, the sawing noise of crickets and the insects of a marsh country signaling the start of their music in the dark.

I just want you to know that I find that sometimes you are sad.  And I just want to erase it.  Maybe not perfectly like it's gone forever.  But for the moment I want you to not be thinking about that...and maybe realize that I find the perfect architecture in you...that all is so perfectly fine so long as you are somewhere in the day.  And maybe in those long hours I might get a chance to be with you and just share the rest of it with you for a tiny brief moment.

How brief a moment?

As brief as a kiss.