NOT KEEPING SCORE

I went on a beautiful hike with my friends Whit and Leslie to the Tule Elk Reserve in Pt. Reyes.

Along the beach at sunset, low tide, there were two dead seals on the shore. One didn’t have a head.

As the tide drained back toward the ocean, pulling, carving, etching trees in the sand, thin watery branches grew, arched, reached toward the yellow cliffs. A jellyfish, shapeless and translucent, was slumped at the trunk of one such eddy. At his end.

I found a starfish with cramped arms and violet skin, gripping a wet clump of sand. I picked him up. Do starfish have gender? Pale, he released nothing, moved nowhere. Thinking by chance he might still be alive, I threw him as hard as I could, back into the frothy sea.

As the sun crashed into the ocean, round halos of sea foam, many feet high, many feet wide, formed at the mouth of the tide. I chalked it up to the recent oil spill. Figures, I scowled, and closed my eyes.

* * *

I have slivers of moments when this is not real: in the first snap of waking, before sleep blossoms into consciousness; in the morning, when the cold air forms steam from earth’s breath; for small blinks in the day, when the sun is so bright it both warms and stuns; and in between the third and fourth belly-glass of red wine, my brother is not dead.

All other times, the clock jerks, voices are slightly off key, and at every taste, my tongue is salt.

* * *

I opened my eyes. The sun was cut in half at the horizon. Orange. A single gull was flying to its left, like a freckle. As the waves hit the rocks and cliffs, splashing high into the air, they momentarily eclipsed the sun; the sand turned purple. The water rang black. My hands, cold and searching, grew five pink petals.

Everything dead came alive again in the sharpness of the light.

I stared right into that tangerine semi-circle and let it burn a hole deep into my eye — I let it tell me, for a sliver of a moment, everything I needed to hear.