No one knows the wet darkness
\nof our walks.
\nThe Bay sliding into the night,
\na blade of silver,
\na universe with its astonished eyes
\nleaping by the thousands
\nfrom the waves.
\nI breathed the air with a terrified calm.
\nThe shore, the jetty with its voices,
\nthe water rippling like a black ribbon
\nagainst the moss and concrete.
\nAnd your stories, irrelevant, assuring,
\nas if my fear were a bad dream,
\nan isolated shadow,
\na sprite in the trees,
\nsomething easily dispersed.<\/p>\n
And I felt your fear.
\nHow the rocks hid their dark shapes,
\nhow a man died of innocence
\nin blank amazement.
\nHow murder changed everything.
\nHow Kelley\u2019s Island held ghosts.
\nHow the geese dropped from the sky,
\nand winter refused to listen
\nto the stories,
\nand the suicide that came later,
\nand you never told me
\nhow love was washed to sea.
\nBut my father,
\nI knew it!<\/p>\n
The crevices of the night
\ntold me your stories.
\nThe different sounds,
\nthe different voices.
\nI traced faces on the frosty mirrors
\nof the windows,
\nand that\u2019s how our walks began,
\nbefore I took milk from a glass,
\nborrowed the red taste of a cherry,
\nsmelled the dank beauty of rain.
\nI grew up in the soul of your memories,
\nheard the strum of a guitar,
\nwatched the broken symmetry
\nof our Sandusky Bay
\ncradle us like crying children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No one knows the wet darkness of our walks. The Bay sliding into the night, a blade of silver, a universe with its astonished eyes…<\/p>\n