Move Through

We move through everything even when it seems we do not.

The red tide comes and the water breaks slowly on the shore, thick and the color of red clay. I sit outside and watch the inky waters press forward until they reach me. At night when the dark falls the waves light up neon blue and green like blinking bar signs. It is an algae bloom that causes the bioluminescence.

Sometimes I wonder what we will say about all of this later. How I will talk about what I did or didn’t do, and how we watched it shift and shape and change like the red waters. Sometimes I am already there. Sometimes I have nothing to say at all.

I dream nightly about your daughter.

I worry I am growing used to all of this and that it will dull my senses to the dangers or make normal things that should not be normal. Our ability to acclimate is a curse and a blessing, we too soon forget the things we swore we would never forget. There is no going back.

In a different life we bought a sail boat and spent a summer in Italy like your father, and I wrote poems no one ever heard and I grew out of my seasickness, and we taught her how to navigate by the stars.

All I really want is some land to call my own, olive trees, and good kissing in the afternoon. I want warm bread and a nightly breeze and to see my mother. I want poems that make my eyes weak and I want sea grass, green glass, and tomato slices for lunch.

It takes olive trees five years to begin bearing fruit, others even longer.