Black Water

I wanted to show you how I'd taste the ocean on your skin under the searchlight moon and pinhole stars and upon the soft shore of sweet North Carolina blackwater. But instead we would sit silent wanting to hold hands. We'd trade affection for eyes cast upward.

Here the eastern sky would be sliced by a sliver of persimmon. Its hairline crack would open the darkness beneath the patient moon, beckoning it to drop as a silver dollar might disappear from magician's hand to chest pocket.

We'd sit and fathom the G-forces reshaping the astronaut's bodies flat, like gravity and limestone, as they outrocketed every sonic boom. Yet the moon stayed put while the ribbon of light faded until its burned ghost upon my lost eyes was all that remained.

We, the white devils, have rehewn these quiet marshes for three centuries past while our ghost piers and flaking whitewash of fence and house seem to be forgetting our father's names.

The Chowan once paddled these shallow inlets, stacking their middens ashore after endless bountiful feasts. The cypress grew taller. The heron flew thicker. The stars burned brighter in a time when there was no need to dream up beauty and life that never was.