Echoes Of The Silent Shore

There come those nights—you know the sort: The ones where the moon is a tear-stained cheek, pressed to heaven’s passenger seat window, Toying with the tides to the rhythm of some melancholy song that only she knows. She’s lonely, and you know she is, because You can feel her tugging at your ankles with each pleading surge she pushes ashore. Homer’s words revive, and the sea is as dark Beneath Erebus as the bottom of the glass That you left unfinished at your hotel. Salt leaves chalky fingerprints up your calves, but you forgive it, Because how often, really, does the moon have a shoulder to cry on like this? She’s confessing to you with every rasp of the water, Lapping over the sand like the bodies of un-shy lovers, and you stand Quiet in the fading froth. No voice rises to cut the night as Selene sobs to you on that midnight beach, and As above, so below, the waves weep; Stuttering susurrations at your feet, supplications to take you under for dinner So that the moon may pour you another glass and whisper her finer secrets where your neck Meets your shoulder: She loves you, but she can only say it with the silence and the solemn Murmur of the sea tasting the sand, that rasping language Older than writing that all the poets know. But you’re no poet, and you are not living in a Salinger story Where you see the evil of man tucked away in the shallows, bananas in its mouth, Compelling you to raise your revolver like a kiss to your temple. The night breathes, and so do you, surging in time with the surf and the rising— Falling of that deep chest above. The silver light, bare of her clouds Sees you at your whollest, and longs to show you the worlds beyond your own. She has no concept of drowning—no concept of pressures deep and fragile lungs. She knows only starlight and starboard, and weightless things that thrive where air cannot. Lonely, vast, she loves you. She loves you. She loves you, she just can’t say it.