Salt and Republic

October.

Steel among cane.
Atlantic listening under black hulls.
Maps stippled red in rooms of polished calm.

The species poised
above its own bright weather.

In a hospital rinsed with fluorescence
my mother folds around pain.
Tile. Metal basin.
Clock climbing its minor hill.

Outside
yield, radius, retaliate.

Inside
water breaking.
blood marking cotton.
my body driven into air.

First breath
while submarines wait for syllables.

No siren in the corridor.
Only white light.
Only counting.

Water first.
Then air.

The keys are not turned.
The sea does not answer.
October withdraws its hand.

November.

A year’s thin distance.

I am carried more than I walk.
Set down among chair legs.
Lifted again.

My grandmother’s house.

Wallpaper dim with leaves that do not fall.
Radiator knocking like a small fist in the wall.
Turkey opened under kitchen glare.
Steam clouding spectacles.

Above the doorway,

a cane.

Dark arc of wood,
smoothed by a vanished palm.

He fell, they said.

Atlantic without mercy.
Wool heavy with covenant.
Deck tilting toward indifference.

Mayflower.
Wind.
Ink not yet dry.

Cold closing over him.

A rope.
A hand.
A body hauled back across wood.

The sea sealing without record.

That curve of reprieve
hung above our threshold.

Dallas.

Sun without omen.
Motorcade moving through ceremony.

A hand mid-gesture.
A sound.

Air breaking.

Pink darkening into fact.

On the table
the knife resting in flesh.
Steam thinning.
No one chewing.

Four generations breathing
beneath the Atlantic curve.

An ancestor drawn from water.
A President falling into brightness.

No rope lowered.

Someone says
Oh God.

Someone lifts me
because the adults require their hands
for their mouths.

Outside, sirens.

Inside, the house holding.

October’s spared fire.
November’s unspared body.

Water once yielded.
Air once did not.

I remember nothing.

Yet salt remains.
Yet breath continues.

Born while oceans concealed their steel.
Standing under a relic of drowning deferred.
Fed at a table where a republic lost its pulse.

The cane above the door.
The screen in the corner.
My small chest rising and falling.

Fall.
Lift.
Fall.

The sea closes.
The sky remains capable.

Breath taken
because it is there.

Camelot extinguished.
The pilgrim’s errand dissolved in salt and television snow.