Final Notes Before the Tide

Charcoal shadows
ripple over a girl’s thin arms,
and patterned skin’s like water spliced
by paddles. The trees blow by
like curtains and the world’s
rush slows
as gravel crunches a film of dust
over her eyes.

She ties back her loose hair and lets it
fall down in sweaty knots, dripping
on each smooth board of a dock,
leaving trails.
A canoe’s hauled into a cellophane sea.

Beating sun with her elbows,
paddling, she wants something
that makes her feel like a cloud,
and the clouds resemble piles
of warm cotton, unburdened.

She is a stone sinking

long blue sadness into morning like the seeded
excrement of sea gulls.

Fishermen laugh from a bay,
bobbing dreamily on a sailed boat,
their pole’s silver lines cut water.
Drifting, voices filling empty
places, they care less for fish,
more for one another. They fill the girl.

Her silence is
shattered glass bearing down
no longer, and she leans back, leans away
from this life. She’ll feel safe floating,
sinking
into bodies of dead harbor seals,
but is it enough
to soften

the blue granite of low stones flickering
in the sea’s icy eyes, or lips
touched by strangers
after drowning?

Dents in the canoe refract light.
The girl steers east towards grey waves
reaching between boulders like hands.
The wind paddles west, grows blustery
when it cannot win against
the calm, unbiased S of a black bird
poised on piles of wrinkled lobster cages,
beckoning from a jagged island.

The girl bites into an apple, the salt
of cashews, clean water from a stainless
steel canteen. Clean sits in her mouth
as cold, wet fish. She washes her lips
with Atlantic’s
glass-colored salt water,
does not want

the flesh of her tongue to be
unburdened by the stain of blueberry mountains
when she dives

blood into rock, ocean in her wet lungs,
cold again
beneath wide, black cormorant wings
with its clean eyes watching

her sink into
flooded cove, tongue swollen
blue.
Dock drops dry. There are no dotted lines
leading home.
Thin arms reflect
seaweed alive at the bottom,
impatient
for water’s recession.