Status: Re-uploaded 20/09/12.
The Sea Breathes
Trickle
It has been one month– thirty days of water, flat and glittering on beaten sand, and thirty nights of dancing with the sea in her silken, midnight garb, spangled with stars like winking oysters. Two lunar cycles have charted the pull of the moon on the tides, sculpting the rhythm in alternating bars of ebb and flow as the sea waltzes in time to celestial music.
Rain trickles down the misty glass, fogging up the windows of my cottage. It patters on the rooftop, and drips from the shingled eaves. It gathers in pools in the lupins along the garden path, slicking their fronds fanned like starfish. It collects in dented leaves like dishes, crawls across slate dredged up from the ocean bed and glistens in strings of pearls along the coral edges of rose petals.
Water surrounds the sea, but she is dry, and clad in starched white lace instead of foam. Her pale legs hang off the edge of the windowsill, dangling like anchors. She has her back to the outside world.
Her mane of weeds has wilted. Her hair no longer curls and twists in playful spirals like climbing vines. The freshwater has leeched it of colour, and flyaways curl back from her forehead like pages licked by fire, peeling in agony. The sea’s story is a tragic one.
When she turns her sullen eyes to the glass, she sees her reflection. Phantom-like, it is superimposed over another mirror– that dark, restless body, composed from rolling storm clouds cupped in cliffs the rain has painted funeral black.
The wind whistles through the caves and the creases in the secret-ridden shore, howling her dirge. It forces wind-bitten creatures back beneath the waves, where the currents rock soothingly, and the biting air can do no harm.
The sea opens her mouth to sigh, and the wind supplies her voice. It saddens me. The water trapped inside the bay is an inky well of sorrows.
I am a child who has brought back sea snails and tiny urchins from the beach in a bucket of seawater, and must now watch them suffocate in still, clear water, severed from the nourishing currents, the arteries that pump the shared lifeblood of every submerged thing. Salt and fine sediments float on the roof of that transparent bucket world, swirling like ghosts.
Poor sea!
Whatever have I done?
Rain trickles down the misty glass, fogging up the windows of my cottage. It patters on the rooftop, and drips from the shingled eaves. It gathers in pools in the lupins along the garden path, slicking their fronds fanned like starfish. It collects in dented leaves like dishes, crawls across slate dredged up from the ocean bed and glistens in strings of pearls along the coral edges of rose petals.
Water surrounds the sea, but she is dry, and clad in starched white lace instead of foam. Her pale legs hang off the edge of the windowsill, dangling like anchors. She has her back to the outside world.
Her mane of weeds has wilted. Her hair no longer curls and twists in playful spirals like climbing vines. The freshwater has leeched it of colour, and flyaways curl back from her forehead like pages licked by fire, peeling in agony. The sea’s story is a tragic one.
When she turns her sullen eyes to the glass, she sees her reflection. Phantom-like, it is superimposed over another mirror– that dark, restless body, composed from rolling storm clouds cupped in cliffs the rain has painted funeral black.
The wind whistles through the caves and the creases in the secret-ridden shore, howling her dirge. It forces wind-bitten creatures back beneath the waves, where the currents rock soothingly, and the biting air can do no harm.
The sea opens her mouth to sigh, and the wind supplies her voice. It saddens me. The water trapped inside the bay is an inky well of sorrows.
I am a child who has brought back sea snails and tiny urchins from the beach in a bucket of seawater, and must now watch them suffocate in still, clear water, severed from the nourishing currents, the arteries that pump the shared lifeblood of every submerged thing. Salt and fine sediments float on the roof of that transparent bucket world, swirling like ghosts.
Poor sea!
Whatever have I done?