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  • Blood
  • Bruce Bond (bio)

When I was a boy, I believed the science that said life on earth began in the sea,

and when it crawled ashore it took a little of the ocean with it, its blood composed

of the same salt and minerals that gave the tide its metal. And I believed despite

the more obvious questions: just how the vital water turned the color of wine,

what it was that washed us to the shore, unconscious, a child of the child we were.

When I laid my ear against the pillow, I heard it: the thump and shush of waves

against some beach in the bedroom dark, and in the moment of my strange reunion,

I felt alone, the way the dead must feel as they walk across their stretch of ocean

barely touching down. This is my blood, read the men in black from a black book.

Drink. It was one of those things we did because, like them, we wanted to belong.

If this was the sea, it had traveled far, from cloud to grape, to the body’s faith

in those who shared fears they barely spoke of. Unresolvable and vast. Like water. [End Page 21]

Unruly until it chills the shape of something. Brine is poison to us now. Not wine.

I have a friend whose wine was poison. I drink it in memory. And then I stop.

Grief can kill you, and who can live without crossing the many oceans each night to find

a language for the exclusions of the day. Out of the sea, we came, bearing with us

its changing weather, its need to change, to feed. I love that word. The give in it that takes.

Water to wine to blood, each one spilling into one like some death wish at the heart

of love. This is my body, says the sea. Eat. I will never be the friend I carry

like an ocean on my back, never the blood he drank and never the same. If the sea

in the fierceness of its solitude takes us in, if there are moments the crumpling

of the waves is quieter than silence, is it any wonder we return. Like blood.

When I was a boy, I had an enormous space in me. It might have been the future

or past, I could not tell, but it was larger than the flesh that bore it. Larger than life

or death or the ocean path between them. When those I loved left, their names came back.

They found us. They floated their empty boats from breath to breath I barely knew was there. [End Page 22]

Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond is the author of fifteen books, including the forthcoming Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan Press), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, University of Tampa Press), Gold Bee (Crab Orchard Open Competition Award, Southern Illinois Press), Sacrum (Four Way Books), and The Other Sky (Etruscan Press). He is Regents Professor at the University of North Texas.

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