River
For Sorrel and my Grandson
A dying light washed over the sea.
We walked, the two of us, along the shoreline; watched a small wave
tremble over shells. We didn’t touch. We didn’t speak. Too afraid.
Time moved but the images were still:
my child’s child lying in a coma, the child I didn’t know,
– and Brown Bear on the bed.
Silent, hunkered on the fringe of the sea, we felt the waves
sidle towards us, flagging, cleansing the sand.
The dream changed direction. Hustled into a small plane
I remember waving goodbye to Sorrel;
I could see her in the pale glow: a figure on a stretch of beach.
The pilot promised to return before dawn; I had to get her back
to the hospital, to her baby son.
A cradle of cloud passed over the sky’s deep arc, and for a moment
I knew the mystery of stars – and age – and death
and for that same moment I held life whole within my palm.
Swinging to tune of tides, riding secret winds, gulls haunted earth and air
with their crying.
Only now I sense a dark burden of grief, and of what might have been.
It was some weeks before I got back; I do not remember how many.
There was no one there. She hadn’t waited.
I called her name – again – and again, ran barefoot over shells
on the empty beach where I had left her.
But wait. Someone was standing in her footprints, tall and straight
by the shine of the sea. I caught the soft grey of his eyes, the fair hair,
blue jeans rolled up to his knees.
‘Hello, you don’t know me. I’m River.’
Page(s) 16
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