Caught the Tide

He liked her awkwardness,

the smudgy yellow light she’d throw.

Why she’d come he didn’t know;

she gave him reason, though,

to think it wasn’t likely she would go.

This didn’t worry him, he liked

that she was there. Something

in her seemed to alter his relationship

with light and temperature and air:

he wouldn’t have been able quite

to say it but with her mute

reassurances he knew that he was

not so much the child of atmosphere

as sibling to it. But what was he

to her, or she to him? He asked

her in the way they had devised

to speak so they could understand

each other – had to do with

cultivating delicate degrees

of rising, falling breaths – he asked

her what she was and what he was.

She asked him what he thought.

Are you my mother, soulmate,

supernatural protector? She said

she didn’t know what supernatural

could mean. And only volunteered

that she was something different

from what he had said. Will you be

with me when I’m dead? Am

I dead? She said she didn’t know

what dead meant. He found

this funny so he laughed. There

we go, she happily replied.

You’ve pushed us off the shore:

we’re on the raft. We’ve

caught the tide.

.