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Description
i.
I heard him first through the fog off the ocean,
edged by salmon sunrise and singing the rhyme
my sailor father taught me about red skies in the morning.
I didn’t think he saw me, watching
as he swung his driftwood sword two-handed
through fog-wraiths and stamping night mares,
but when they lay defeated, dissipating into the tossed sand,
he sheathed his sword in the loops of his faded blue jeans
and footprinted to me, half-hiding in the beach grass susurrus.
He was shirtless, and the fragile bellows of his ribcage
brought to mind the anoles my brothers caught,
their terrible tenderness trapped in careful palms,
but his smile was wide and crooked,
white teeth all crowding for the front row behind his lips,
and his hazel eyes were gold and alive,
so I didn’t think he might be breakable.
He stuck out one browned and salty hand
and didn’t mind the damp sand I got on his fingers.

ii.
School was hard for him, easy for me.
Some days I would see him in the corner of my eye
biting ragged fingertips and slipping callused feet from shoes,
flexing his toes to stretch the webbing between them.
I knew when a teacher yelled at him
for not paying attention, or an older boy
yanked his long oak-and-sunshine hair
and called him a fag so quietly no one could reprimand.
These days he would take me to our salt marsh
on the handlebars of his creaking bike, and
I would hide our shoes in the bushes.
As we squelched untalking through the low-tide mud,
scuttling crabs and avoiding the sharpened mouths of oysters,
I would watch the twitch, shift, and slide of his back muscles,
trusting his feet to pick our way through the cord grass
to our island, little jut of live oak forest
where some spiritual one had built a wooden clapboard chapel
then abandoned it to nature and whatever gods they believed in.
It was the only place he sang anymore, voice strong and rhythmic
like the waves falling against the shore in the dark midnight,
or high and broken like the keening wail of a seagull.

iii.
When he fell in love with a girl who wanted his eyes
to look at herself, his voice to sing for her alone,
I splinted his disjointed parts with driftwood and red wine
in our chapel and he borrowed my kisses,
forgetting until morning I was not the one he wanted.
I would count the notches in his spine
until he fell asleep, and think of the night he told me
about a baleen whale who sang on a frequency
no other whales could hear, her singular voice
bouncing around the ocean meaninglessly,
growing deeper each unresponsive year.
We were watching stars, waiting for them to fall,
and I reminded him that scientists heard her calls,
but he said they didn’t count, they weren’t whales
and could never love her back. I guess he was right.
I followed her across the oceans,
and when she died from “lack of socialization,”
I never told him why I was crying.

iv.
The sky was in flames the morning he disappeared.
We’d spent one last summer night on our island
before fall froze the mud, frightened away the birds
and sent me two hours from my ocean and him.
In the inferno of sunrise, he went sailing,
his departure a foggy memory of waves crashing,
sleepy mumbling that he shouldn’t test the weather,
and his laughter, promises to be back before I woke.
He wasn’t when I woke up late to pounding
and, searching through the driving rain,
I found only absence of color on the small beach
where I should have seen his green-and-gold sails,
no matter how far I ran, kicking wet sand, yelling his name.
Later, his boat was found, crunching gently against the rocks, sails ripped,
but never his body, and after two months of morbid beachcombing,
they stopped seeing him in every lump of driftwood.
I still murmur his name to the cranes and the crabs,
remembering stories from my mother about men who were not men:
He came to me from the mist and the sea, hair dark and slick,
running against the wind on broad flat feet.
I had him for seven years of marsh-mudfights
and guarding turtle nests, seven years cradling the ferocity
of the ocean in my two small arms,
but there was always a song I could not hear,
one beneath his human skin, and looking back,
I would never loop the knot and tie him to my dry sand
once he heard her call in his salty blood.

Description
i.
I heard him first through the fog off the ocean,
edged by salmon sunrise and singing the rhyme
my sailor father taught me about red skies in the morning.
I didn’t think he saw me, watching
as he swung his driftwood sword two-handed
through fog-wraiths and stamping night mares,
but when they lay defeated, dissipating into the tossed sand,
he sheathed his sword in the loops of his faded blue jeans
and footprinted to me, half-hiding in the beach grass susurrus.
He was shirtless, and the fragile bellows of his ribcage
brought to mind the anoles my brothers caught,
their terrible tenderness trapped in careful palms,
but his smile was wide and crooked,
white teeth all crowding for the front row behind his lips,
and his hazel eyes were gold and alive,
so I didn’t think he might be breakable.
He stuck out one browned and salty hand
and didn’t mind the damp sand I got on his fingers.

ii.
School was hard for him, easy for me.
Some days I would see him in the corner of my eye
biting ragged fingertips and slipping callused feet from shoes,
flexing his toes to stretch the webbing between them.
I knew when a teacher yelled at him
for not paying attention, or an older boy
yanked his long oak-and-sunshine hair
and called him a fag so quietly no one could reprimand.
These days he would take me to our salt marsh
on the handlebars of his creaking bike, and
I would hide our shoes in the bushes.
As we squelched untalking through the low-tide mud,
scuttling crabs and avoiding the sharpened mouths of oysters,
I would watch the twitch, shift, and slide of his back muscles,
trusting his feet to pick our way through the cord grass
to our island, little jut of live oak forest
where some spiritual one had built a wooden clapboard chapel
then abandoned it to nature and whatever gods they believed in.
It was the only place he sang anymore, voice strong and rhythmic
like the waves falling against the shore in the dark midnight,
or high and broken like the keening wail of a seagull.

iii.
When he fell in love with a girl who wanted his eyes
to look at herself, his voice to sing for her alone,
I splinted his disjointed parts with driftwood and red wine
in our chapel and he borrowed my kisses,
forgetting until morning I was not the one he wanted.
I would count the notches in his spine
until he fell asleep, and think of the night he told me
about a baleen whale who sang on a frequency
no other whales could hear, her singular voice
bouncing around the ocean meaninglessly,
growing deeper each unresponsive year.
We were watching stars, waiting for them to fall,
and I reminded him that scientists heard her calls,
but he said they didn’t count, they weren’t whales
and could never love her back. I guess he was right.
I followed her across the oceans,
and when she died from “lack of socialization,”
I never told him why I was crying.

iv.
The sky was in flames the morning he disappeared.
We’d spent one last summer night on our island
before fall froze the mud, frightened away the birds
and sent me two hours from my ocean and him.
In the inferno of sunrise, he went sailing,
his departure a foggy memory of waves crashing,
sleepy mumbling that he shouldn’t test the weather,
and his laughter, promises to be back before I woke.
He wasn’t when I woke up late to pounding
and, searching through the driving rain,
I found only absence of color on the small beach
where I should have seen his green-and-gold sails,
no matter how far I ran, kicking wet sand, yelling his name.
Later, his boat was found, crunching gently against the rocks, sails ripped,
but never his body, and after two months of morbid beachcombing,
they stopped seeing him in every lump of driftwood.
I still murmur his name to the cranes and the crabs,
remembering stories from my mother about men who were not men:
He came to me from the mist and the sea, hair dark and slick,
running against the wind on broad flat feet.
I had him for seven years of marsh-mudfights
and guarding turtle nests, seven years cradling the ferocity
of the ocean in my two small arms,
but there was always a song I could not hear,
one beneath his human skin, and looking back,
I would never loop the knot and tie him to my dry sand
once he heard her call in his salty blood.