The Gulf Stream surges affably warm near the island
but the mosquitoes are unbearable on the path to the sea;
bicycling out I wiped bloody smears down my legs and wept,
not knowing what to do, ashamed to be so stained with death.
Slack water was what we wanted, he said, near high tide,
though I struggled to understand, and in the boat

he didn't speak at all, just held the boat
as I stepped in, and we left the diffident island
in our wake, pushing slowly against the tide.
I squinted ahead into the rage of light on sea—
Our Lady of salt and birth and untimely death—
while gulls wheeled, convulsed, and wept.

At the first buoy he pulled; the string wept
against the scarred gunwales of the boat
a moaning promise of near-certain death
though I'd not checked the rules on the island
and my host sorted crabs silently for pot and sea,
shaking wire cages from the still swelling tide.

I was already sick from the motion, though the tide
was mild and hardly noticed that I wept
as quietly as I could, the child inside my own sea
still confident of his mother, his gently rocking boat.
I longed to leave the water, the wasting island,
all the leak and flow of depletion and death—

where was expectancy or generation in this spate of death
and famished hardness? What storm or running tide
would deliver us, would uncouple us from this island?
The crabs waved their desperate, stiffening limbs and wept
for water, for deep fathoms and no shadow of boat,
gulping and exhaling iridescent bubbles to home, to sea.

Now three lifetimes and many endings since that sea
and still I struggle with the self-assurance of death,
the grief with which the crabman worked his lines and boat
and drove us back against the returning tide.
My son was born in that winter of mourning and wept
for us all, his small cries beating against the island.

Still the sea drowns and breathes with her tide.
And though our mothers wept and knew many kinds of death,
yet our small boat ventures farther from the island.

Lisa Creech Bledsoe

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