Where the Seine Meets the Channel

This isn’t pretense. Or poetry, for that matter, nor the thin strip of scotch tape that keeps the two of them from touching. This isn’t friendly, but it shouldn’t be taken for malicious, either.  This is a segue between two cancelled comedy revues.  This is goodbye like a phosphorescent fish shrinking to a spark in the Marinaras Trench. This is goodbye like the Man on the Moon’s silhouette atop the solar eclipse.  This is a goodbye like pulling baby teeth.

It was where the Dnieper cuts through the wheat fields. No, no, it was atop sea foam soaked fjords in central Norway.  No.  I remember now.  It was a sandy beach where the Seine meets the Channel, when Le Havre was but a prescient whisper.  It was dark; not from a lack of light, but from a lack of history.  They stood in a silent circle, sprigs of bittersweet woven in their hair, gazing silently upon their fallen king.  They laid him in a crudely built boat, waiting on the others.

This is the smell of ponderosa pine as you leave the Front Ranges, confronted by the vastness of the Great American Desert.  This is weaving gold from straw, and mourning as your horse starves.  This is sex without an orgasm, and it is an orgasm without love.  This was a twenty-four year-old man believing in Santa Claus; here’s to remembering that treading water is drowning, if you finally remember to ignore your lungs.

The others coalesced from the surrounding trees, faggots of firewood upon their shoulders.  They piled them around the fallen king, a forgettable man in death.  There were few tears–not for lack of sorrow, but out of respect for a life well lived.  The prince–the king, now–did not glance at the ship.  He stared blankly out to water, towards a place too far distant for anything but the arc of his imagination to touch.  White cliffs like towers of ivory, unassailable, across a skinny swath of sea.

This is Alyosha sinning, and then sinning again.  This is Thomas Gray buried in a country churchyard.  This is St. Denis carrying his head like a brain is a cross to bear.  This was Daisy Buchanan glowing brightly green.

A bearded boy pushes a burning boat out to sea.  Farewell.