Shoals

I saw the thing go wandering down along the infinite shoals

It looked just like the wife I’d lost on the day I’d watched her go.

She’d said that she would miss me and she’d hoped to say goodbye

To the nothing life we’d never built on the backs of honest lies.

She had the hair I saw last week in the aisle of an empty store

And even then I’d waved it down to see if it was her.

But she didn’t have the face I knew or that fated finite smile

She was just a memory for another man, another woman, another child.

The thing that walked on water wore the dress I’d always seen

In all the wedding pictures shot of the lives we were about to lead.

She looked so very beautiful, that thing that wasn’t mine

She was everything she’d almost been when we’d topped our Everest climb.

The swelling waters rose until they met a perfect neck that couldn’t be

On the thing that knew my wife so well it paled my own memory.

For things are no longer as I see them and the past lives at my side

And I see my dead things living as if they had never said goodbye.

I want so much to join them in their world and that place I cannot go

I want her hair to touch my face and her eyes to miss me so.

The thing I never married is just a fragment of what is left

But that is still enough of her to bring me back the life I’d kept.

I held our lives in fear draped arms that weighed like Atlas stones

The pictures and the time that meant we were the best we’d ever known.

I saw her in the depths dust-deep and I hoped it was her soul

So deeply hidden in molded boxes that belonged along the shoals.

I sent all our lives out sailing in a boat meant just to sink

I would’ve started fires but this was the life we would’ve seen.

We would’ve sailed oceans vast and swam waves that rivaled mountains

We would’ve seen the dreams of timeless things that hid us from the end.

The boxes sank in crashing blue and it’s then that I saw her rise

The thing that looked just like the one to whom I’d pledged my life.

She was so close to my snapshot world that shone empty in my hands

That I stepped into her rising grasp to chase love beyond this living land.

The thing that was so much like her smiled as my waters rose

And she stood atop the chaos waves just to watch me go.

Because she was still my everything and that could never change

And all we’d had I’d always be even as all dead sirens sang.

The gagging world beneath was clear and I watched our boxes sink

They fell in black and green that moved away from the life I couldn’t lead.

I didn’t know if the thing was her or if I’d been led so far astray

All I knew was what I’d lost and what had gone away.