1.
The river’s a slow snake idling through eelgrass (now and then its body pouches). Red-winged blackbirds watch the uncoiling, hide their young the way lint finds pocket depths. They are noiseless, stock-still (their hearts must beat like pocket watches).
2.
Kelp is kindling on the air, a hot house-party of algae and brine; sea flowers by crude acre, burst inland until love-lies-bleeding takes over, or lady slippers stepping into soft coves as though changing rooms in the middle of the night (you can’t hear silk talk).
3.
A newsboy puffs images resting on a bank (he’s earned the butt, he figures), a beached dory powders the air with dusty ribs; salt works its wonders, mouth of erosion, mouth of dream. An old man, knee-locked, land-locked, a familiar roll still tossing his hips, casts his gray eyes outward at stoneless graves, hearkening his sons to his feet. Voices ride the tide, whisper the valid tongues of the marsh and the dark undertaking of root.
4.
Dangers are everywhere about the river: the porous bog whose underworld has softened for centuries, the jungles cat o’nines leap up into. Once, six new houses ago, one new street along the banking, two boys went to sea on a block of ice. They are sailing yet, their last flag a jacket shook out in the slow gray dusk still hiding in Decembers every year. The old man has strawberries in his backyard. They run rampant part of the year. He planted them the year his sons caught the last lobster the last day of their last storm.
Summers, strawberries and salt mix on the high air. A truck driver, dumping snow another December, backed out too far and went too deep. His wife hung a wreath at the town garage. His son stutters when the snow falls. At the all-night diner, a waitress remembers how many times she put dark liquid in his coffee. When she hears a Mack or a Reo or a huge and cumbersome White as big as those old Walters Sno-fighters used to be, she tastes the hard sense of late whiskeys. He had an honest hunger and an honest thirst, and thick eyebrows, she remembers thick thick eyebrows.
5.
Salt comes in on the morning air like the wounded walking home, a worked ripeness, a pain hanging. It promises to cleanse wholly a nursing home’s back room/stairs, all that’s hidden from Central Street. Salt teaches me balm and history; it occludes itself, becomes a soul masseuse, assuager, its thickness at times a spiriting; and when it gets too heavy, too much for the soul, I see the Great Salt Lake flats, burnt wide under the pouring sun all its immeasurable reach being cut up in portable chunks for the West-spreaders’ wagons, hear the clout of it all.
6.
In August, when marsh grasses and ‘nines burn past midnight, justice is left over from smoke; nests flare up whose young the minute before winged off.
7.
I share salt with strawberries, others’ sons, arethusa bulbosa sadly purple in hiding places, the red-winged shifty pilots near their linted nests, eels I won’t touch, turtles I do. We put flashlights and stones in glass milk bottles left over from Nicholson’s Dairy and inserted them in step locks to pull at alewives running their mad dash up the river before noon was known. By hand we caught them, salt healing wounds and bruises in our own whirlpool and Illume. Some of us heard the sea calling, even way back then, from Normandy, from Leyte and Anzio and the smell only Pusan Harbor knows. George knows the salt of the French coast, his nose stuffed with it forever, and tall, gaunt basketeer Ernie, hands splayed wide as maps, where the lifeline ran away from itself, kisses yet the first-wave salted sands Iwo Jima threw up at his mouth, or was it Kwajalein? memory asks. Once, near thirteen, we shared a cigarette under cover of the mist and the alewives passed us, upstreaming. That’s the night we forgot to listen.
8.
Mist administers salt in dark dosages, or fog does the duty when streetlights flatten beneath the grip. Cures prevail. Some paralyzes pale by comparison where warm waters muscle their way in.
9.
Some of these night-esteemed neons violate the marshy estuary where time and tide meet and fuels are stationed. At the rim of the reeds, Standard Oil has a new red glare limping along the briny path. Strawberries sleep all winter. Only sons know the true darkness where the horizon comes down, where the salt is mined.
10.
Oil slicks are silent rainbows; underway the prism orients points of the moon and paths only deep waters know. I still love the river the sea comes in on, how it knuckles down to the old milldam across the street from me, twice a day touching, twice a day.
And the salt borne, all the salt borne.
—
This post is republished on Medium.
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