Grief

Grief arrives without announcement.
Not as a thought
but as a change in pressure.

The ground loosens.
The body misjudges its own weight.
One stands where one was standing
and suddenly is not.

A current takes the knees first.
There is no drama in this.
Only the efficient pull
of something that has been waiting.

Salt in the mouth.
The lungs remembering older oceans.
Breath becomes a theory
quickly disproved.

Below the surface
figures drift.
Not monsters exactly,
not myths either,
but familiar distortions
of things once named and trusted,
now rearranged.

Time elongates.
Tears acquire density.
The sea becomes administrative,
doing what seas do
without interest in the swimmer.

Or else
one remains on the shore.

Watches the repetition of waves,
their argument with stone,
the persistence of sound.
The body intact,
the mind reduced to a narrow ledge
where sobbing is permitted
because it does not threaten survival.

In this way
grief instructs.

Some are taken.
Some are left holding
the knowledge of water
without entering it.

Both learn
what the sea has always known:

that even this
does not remain.

Grief rises,
breaks,
withdraws—

passing through the body
the way a wave passes through water,
leaving no mark
except the knowledge
that it was there.