We Live by the Currents

Published in literary journal ZINDaily.

There was another suicide yesterday
on the beach, by the sea: the dunes behind him, the ocean in front,
on the second day of April.

I couldn’t help but wonder,
if he’d managed to survive
the hard winter—
couldn’t he see the promise of spring?

Out here, they choose to give themselves
to the ocean, the voluntary dead,
jumping off the pier, swinging over the harbor,
swimming out to sea, bodies
kissed by the waves.
Their last thoughts
of tides and currents and fish,
or perhaps of calm nothingness,
of grayness, of peace that it’s finally over:
Whatever it was caused them such pain.
That’s the way I imagine it;
but I am also a child of the sea,
I know how to feel safe in its darkness.

I know, too, what they forget,
the suicides of April,
the sea is not your accomplice:
it can turn on you at any time
and rip you to shreds.

The fishermen know, and they aren’t
among those who choose to die in the spring;
death is too real to them, too close.
Too many times boats leave this harbor, gay
bright paint chipping off their bows
and the call of the fish out there pulling them toward the horizon
until they try too hard, or for too long,
or maybe it’s not their fault:
She takes even those who don’t wish to be taken
even those who don’t make a mistake—

pounding them onto the shoreline,
bits of bright flotsam and ghost nets,
and away down the beach, the one choosing to stop,
the one choosing to stop loving the sea that he surfs
and loving it instead as he dies,
that one, even, may pause before he acts
to see the terrible strength of the one
to which he gives himself,
pause and sigh if he looks around him,
if he wonders in the last moments
which of them it is that has won.