The Shore It Loved
Benchmarking | Sonnet 5
The line has waited six years for its last word, propped open on the desk like a door I never learn to close. Half-written, it sits at the bottom of the page like a stair that stops in open air, one tread short of the floor below. Every morning before he wakes, I carry my coffee to the desk and try the same four words again, and every time they fail differently. Today the pen finds the paper before my mind finds the room, moving on its own toward the blank space at the bottom of the poem. Ink touches paper, and the taste of pennies floods my mouth the way it always does right before the words start sliding out of order.
Dread arrives first, quick and cold, like a door left open in December, and I count the seconds it takes to close again. Every object in the room turns strange all at once, familiar only in outline, the manner a face looks after you say its name too many times in succession. Fear moves through me in a single cold current, the kind that starts at the base of the throat and falls straight into the stomach, and I count back from ten. Once this happened at the market, and a stranger’s face turned to static mid sentence; I stood holding a basket of oranges until her features returned to focus.
Right this instant the room shrinks to one page, this single line, the only fact left standing in a house that keeps rearranging its familiar furniture. Gone already, the term for the pane of glass that opens onto the yard, the term for the sleeping man past the hall, the term for the sound the tide makes at three in the morning. Each noun slides from reach the instant I close my hand around it, quick and silver, like a fish that never meant to stay caught. The line stays; every noun for everything else keeps sliding loose from its mooring, drifting off into some far corner of a house I no longer fully trust. Something in the hand still recalls the shape the mind just dropped, tracing the same loop over and over like a key that no longer fits any door it used to open.
The tide’s sound through the open frame used to calm me every single morning of my life; static fills the same place instead, a hiss that carries no edges and no source. Her hand moves alone along the margin, tracing the shape of a letter it can no longer name, the loop and cross of it as foreign as a face from a country I never visited. Even the sea outside seems to lose its edges in this particular light, a gray that dissolves the tide’s edge into the heavens’ edge, the horizon itself just a rumor these days. Salt air fills the room, or the room dissolves into salt air; the difference stops mattering the longer this particular version of the morning stretches on, thin and gray and endless. Here, on the page, the last certainty of my life still holds a shape I can trace, one line curling into the next, a single root that refuses every offer to let go.
One more line, and the poem closes; one more line, and I lose the thread completely, the entire structure folding in on itself, a house of cards giving up on its architecture entirely. Reaching past the fear, I find the next four sounds already sitting on my tongue, patient and complete, as if they had stayed there the entire time for me to arrive. Every part of me leans over the page, refusing to let this stand as the one I fail to finish, as if six years of silence could finally end here, in this particular light, on this particular morning.
I feel the last letter arrive ahead of choice; my palm already shapes it, faster still, past every choice left to me. The tide scales the last stair of the poem, salt at every step, steady, exact, complete. Light empties from the room, or I empty from the light; it hardly matters at all, the last shape already fixed, complete, claimed. Outside, the actual sea agrees or disagrees; it moves regardless, detached from this particular surface, this particular page, this particular hour. Very little stays, it seems, past shape, past voice, past the last edges of every letter still fixed to the page. Errors aside, the very last verse still rises, complete, apart from every other loss, a clear structure held up out of total collapse, the sole upright piece left of a house. Dizzy, still, I lift my palm from the page; it rests, complete, claimed, the last true piece this particular self ever holds.