on this sunday last year i was in cambridge & jeff & addie took me out to the sea. this is what i wrote later in their apartment:
4 March 2002
Cambridge
Oh: yesterday we went out to the ocean. We took the car up to Plum Island (northish of the city) singing along to Dar as we drove. I sat in the backseat and tried not to cry. After all the drinking of the night before � all the skin hunger � High Mass at St Paul�s in the morning, next to Harvard, where I held hands with Jeff during the homily but not during the Our Father � & watching hills & marshes & clapboard things go by, & listening to these sad, strong songs � & how much I didn�t want Jeff to turn around to face me having caught me crying in the rearview mirror. So I just looked out the window & sang louder.
This is what I thought as we drove out off Highway 1 on the little road out to Plum Island � we drove out with marsh on one side of the road and marsh & bay on the other � & I thought, They have solided the earth to put down this road. We are driving over no road at all.
I tried to imagine wading out through that marsh. For a long time I couldn�t think of the word for it. I thought of �flats� but knew �flats� was wrong. The only thing like it I had ever seen would have been the rice paddies in Japan. The last time I saw the ocean it was the Pacific, at Matsushima. How I was unafraid! How I loved being on that fast tour boat, feeding the gulls bits of that giant shrimp cracker. My stupid long hair in the breeze. The smell of the sea which I will always associate with Japan, which is probably narrow enough that the whole place does smell sea-ish. Almost seven years ago.
In the backseat I was drinking Cherry Coke to lift all the lingering wine out of me.
Everything was utterly grey and we drove through the grey down looking for a place to park the car. All the gorgeous crazy raised-up houses of the brave crazy people who live right up next to the sea.
And then we were walking out a stretch of sand to the sea.
Which was loud. Not loud, maybe persistent. Addie made hissing sounds, talking back to the hiss of the water stretching out over the strand & back again to itself. She had this wild young grin all across her face. �It�s so seductive,� she said. �It�s so seductive I just want to run out into it.�
I stood with my hands dug into my pockets & I stared. The wind hit me just in one ear and I didn�t want to move. I wanted to turn the right angle northeast & face Reykjavik & cry. I walked on down the strand with Addie & Jeff, out of the bay & toward the greater, stronger sea.
I don�t know the name of the bay or the name of much of anything. There was that wind rushing at the left side of my head and there was the sound of all that vastness. Water and Air. Water and wind.
I thought about Mischka not going out to the beach with them, staying out of Cambridge overnight/up all night in some damn hotel. Then Addie mentioned him, his not-going, & I thought about him some more.
I thought about the uselessness of my heart, of all my longing & all my fear & all my rituals. I thought of the Fillyjonk. Of the difference between fearless and brave. Of all the songs I know about people walking right up to the ocean & sometimes right out into it too.
I tried explaining, again, out loud, to both of them Why I Am Afraid Of The Ocean but somehow my heart wasn�t in it.
My heart was in the sea! �->No, it wasn�t. (But I wrote it down anyway.)
It was all so unrelenting. And lovely. I really felt called out to it. I don�t know what I mean by it but I know it was good to be there. To be brave.
Addie said, �I�m so glad I�m a poet.� She talked about how poets look at the sea & how it is better to be a poet than a deep sea diver or a marine biologist. She threw �Cartography� back at me, the bit about learning the sea from books.
We all got our shoes wet, playing chicken with the little waves that seethed up onto the sand. I tripped over my own feet & fell on my ass & didn�t mind. Addie dug out, with the toe of her shoe, big letters to spell my name in the sand. After only two waves it was gone completely. I was going to throw Spenser at her, I wrote my lover�s name upon the sand, but I couldn�t remember more than the first line & I didn�t want to be that silly. We took photographs. Our glasses (Addie�s & mine) got bleary, filmed-up & coated with salt. It softened all the grey and hurt my eyes.
At one point I was just standing very close to the water & it came up and for just those few seconds I was standing in the sea. I was touching Iceland & Honshu Island & India & Sakhalin.
I felt very empty and in-love.
I wanted to throw both of them into the water & follow them in. I wanted it to be not cold but still dangerous and I wanted to sink down drunk and kiss them until dark.
What is there to say? There was the sharp dark deep grey of the water, and there was the indifferent grey of the sky. There was the wind rushing loudly and all of this just went on forever. I tried to face Iceland but then realized it didn�t matter, the whole sea reaches out to it, so I looked out directly into the sea & thought of being on a boat out with no land, wondered how many hours between Iceland & Greenland, & then Newfoundland.
Here is something I don�t talk about. That is what I find more fearful than the sea. That is the sky � which starts at the ground, or the water, and stretches up and never stops. It goes on absolutely forever. It swallows whatever it touches. That means it swallows this earth & therefore it is only a superstition & a convention for me to say it starts at the ground where I stand. Either way it is terrible. It horrifies. When I think of it I feel dizzy & microscopic. Next to that what is the sea?
As we walked back toward the car I thought about living on the coast. My empty heart was, because empty, light. I was beaming. I felt still a little drunk. I tried cleaning the salt off my glasses.
Jeff found a piece of plastic in the sand: shaped like a U.
I said, �Can you think of words that begin with U?�
They said, �Urchin. Useful. Undulate.�
