Sea Room

July 9th, Lying-in

July 9th, Lying-in The room faced south, faced the wind from Narragansett Bay and from farther—it was the arid, chalk-clean air of ancient worlds, of ruins kept in order by quiet laws, the protected acropolis, that early doorway. All that went before arrived in me that evening, each true art and every practicality— tools that still work as when first made out of stone, out of bronze, then you, your rainy flesh, like a fossil first rinsed in a bucket and rinsed again by the light ofday. It might be coincidence, something explained by science, a biological oddity or red letter in numerology, that power similar to the suck of drains, the swirling of cyclones which twist left or right depending in which hemisphere the soul turns up. Whatever made your birth fall upon mine that same hot day and the decades between us has its meaning. I keep my eyes opened to that time, the same moment when daisies, fish, ice sculptures began to decline, stink, dissolve away. Not this, our name, a red blur writing of its own importance— a warm scrolling upon the index of each cell. !9 ...