Mine begins under a bridge. It cries of cliché, that the blanket burden begins somewhere between a beginning and an edge rather than an end; at the rotted wooden breaching of a life I had not only chosen, but had curled around and grown as my own. The darkness was the same, or somehow hatched from a speckled, imperfect love; a lust sprung from my bright insides, my need for breaking dawn. Blue is the color that lights my memory of those moments, those moments inside of the most violent earthly velveteen. It is blue not in nostalgia or in mourning or in the full, frothy glass of melancholy served. Instead, what I see is blue as monsoon, blue as a better, if opened, sky.
The following is what lies inside of my father’s first folder. I knew he was a fisherman. But so too was he a poet, a writer I never knew.
I am an old man.
Fierce weather in the thoroughfare
Breaks the panes
And takes me to seaside
Where I wait, the last blast to lift me
Between the Widow’s Island and the Hen’s
That I be reborn as seals reborn, and porpoises,
Feeding on the debris at slack tide.
Many are the drownings, winters
Of fine, strong men
Swept to cold shoals and reefs.
Bones are found in tide pools at ebb.
Many the crystal forests, often ice storms
Make boats wallow in the heavy seas.
Mans flesh burned white by ice.
Be they so bold
There are many with one ear
Fingers taken by the sea
For smelt and sardines.
