The Island

The Island

And in my travels I beheld an island, cloaked in tall forests with leaves the color of bruises and slate-baby-blue and crowned by mountains, huge and terrible, or perhaps only seeming towering and sharp against the soft flatness of the sea. I was greeted in harbor by a sea-eyed man who bade me anchor well and led me up to the highest peak, passing tidepools gouged into the mountainside, still and overhot and salt. The man said ‘wait’- on the highest peak- and I sat me on a clamshell, overturned- and we watched the sea, the color of old, fading bruises and crumbling slate, bunch up on itself from the far horizon’ ‘till it tumbled down its faces, tall and terrible; ‘till the mountains, small and soft in the shadow of the water, foundered and sank and were lost in the swirl. We two alone, on the highest peak, we two were spared, though the water washed over our feet in its joy, and tiny fish gasped ‘round our places. He said to me- every day, this. Every day this reversing- the sea taking back what was hers from the first.

The wave drained away from the tops of the trees; poured in waterfalls down where it deigned to wander. The mistress departing her country again.

The man led me back, where my ship laid in harbor. She laid now in pieces, adrift in the flood, no more mine to pilot. As his too had passed.

My travels are ended. The wave washes o’er me, and higher each day does she rise in her wrath.

Every day, this reversing.