Earlier today, we wound our way
through lush lavender and green,
bougainvillea cascading red down terra cotta walls.
A stuccoed portico covered round tiles
that spilled like pools of smooth latte
around the curve of the pink pebbled drive.
The path around the house
separated hibiscus from bird of paradise,
split this shaded view of the distant ocean
from mid afternoon sun.
Intermittent winds gusted hard,
turning left out of Africa.
They blew harder still on the open terrace
where brown fingers rubbed lime and salt onto glasses,
their rims ringing with each twist
of the hand.
We witnessed the sea turn
from jade to aqua then violet
while shaved ice melted into tequila.
Mammoth rocks jutted out of the water
where longtails and cahows rested,
keeping watch over ebb tide,
like us.
Steel drums beckoned us down to the beach.
We wove along the narrow path through sea grass
onto a long pier that met the mound of late sun
at the horizon.
The pictures we took show us in silhouette,
orange spreading out over the water behind us.
You can’t see our faces,
only that
black wind had whipped our hair out
like the spine of the lionfish as it slid
among crevices of a murky cave
far below low tide.
Strange, there’s a safe abandon this far out over the water.
Just under us waves writhe dark, foreign,
and tufts of plants with white tendrils waver
like ghosts in slow motion.
Earlier our glass-bottomed boat slid over
gnarled conchs and sporadic seaweed,
and some fish like aliens walked the ocean floor.
They are below us here too,
and more.
This afternoon,
we had followed the flight of two lone seagulls
winging over turquoise swells,
white caps running like fingers over a key board.
They had swooped down to fish
from a school of grouper on the surface,
then retreated.
The cloudless sky had offered
yet another empirical look,
to keep watch
over the incessant turn of tides
and all that belongs below.
© Susan Muse, 2013
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Lionfish
Photo by Daniel Dietrick
Wikimedia Commons |
