Drowning in the North Atlantic

March 22, 1998

If I squint the water looks like a wall of clay I used to play with in Kindergarten, always fooled by how smooth and cool in looked in the metal tube Mrs. Grady gave us, even the smell is the same, stirred up, like cookie dough, though when here I always think of the salt water taffy I annoyed my uncles to buy me until they did, and taste its sweet and salty flavor with each breath I breath, and feel the moist air like the taffy or clay against my tongue – “don’t eat that!” Mrs. Grady yelling, although I always did, always needing to taste everything as if I could make no sense of the world unless through my mouth, my lips gatekeeper so my young universe I would later come to appreciate.

“Spit it out!”

And I did that, too, wet dough thumping onto the desk in front of me, and that too, looking like the sea, now, gray, with a gray sky, as if waiting for me to press against it some newsprint comic strip to give it shape, or to mold it between my fingers, stroking out each lump until something new thing emerged.

I leave my fingerprints, greasy, smeared and chaotic on every experience, like a criminal who insists on getting caught for the crimes I otherwise need to hire, taking blame for each new creation, as if I intended to make what ultimately came out, dragging home then and now something to hang on the door of the refrigerator, not quite art – hoping someone will love it anyway.

When the sun shifts, I see this wall of water like the color of glass bricks, hazy and gray, like an off color tooth I try to disguise, or that odd piece of mis-colored slate of the old style sidewalks in front of my house, murky water that doesn’t even reflect the shapes of the people who stand at the foot of each incoming wave, the sweaty women with thick clothing against this still-cool season, water and people looking like the dust that gets caught in slashes of sunlight through the front windows of my old house. I keep waiting for the wind to gust to make water and people dance, but none do.

Where the sunlight shows far out from shore, the water gleams with a smooth and dirty green like cross of jade I found in a back street shop in LA’s little Chinatown, bought for my girlfriend, broken during some dispute, the pieces scattered and later reclaimed from some gutter where some thug threw them as away as worthless, later inspiration for this piece of sea I stand staring out at, like the last healthy part in a dying body too critical to recover.

And here I am, drowning in the North Atlantic, smeared with the pale colors of painful memories, seeing the shattered pieces of my own reflection on each incoming way. I can no longer breathe under the weight of the water; I cannot feel the bottom with the tips of my toes, only the jagged edges of stone that stick up from the bottle, slick sea shells nobody sells near the shore, tied to this illusion by stringy, slimy seaweed I can not until, bound to a vision I cannot close my eyes against, waiting for the sirens’ song, catching whiffs of some older more pleasant life I used to have hear – the fried peppers and sausage, the burned French fries, the overcooked pizza with brown crust – lost, lingering on the tip of my tongue like a word half forgotten, too frail for anyone to toss out as a life rope, as I slowly sink deep into the pale colors of my past.