Fiddlers

At high tide, they begin the procession. Arms raised, slow waving claws, tipping fingers in the wind. The sea is calm. The crabs freeze with my footfall. They escape into the dark shore holes in an instant. In and out of the holes, they go. They peek out for safe passage. An endless wave of fiddlers, silently dancing along the dusty shore, under the cordgrass and over the discarded clamshells in dried mud. The birds circle overhead. The sun soaks up the puddles. And the fiddlers wave to one another as they dance and dig. They retreat to the holes in unison at a sound and return to the pebbled sand, one by one, with a shuffle and wave. Endless silent songs along the shore, told with the rise and fall of a sea of calm claws in the salt marsh sun.

My Underworld

I once lived in a house of poems. My love was shared in a world of songs. She sung to me, I echoed her call. We composed fires to keep us safe and warm. But then, my mind crept into her past. It dove and drown there, shadows broke down our walls. She was drawn down into my moving images. Scenes of many sorrows that I could not withdraw. Ego ghosts and goblins pulled her away from me. I descended into a grave of memory, yet she followed me. She held my hand and waited for our ascension. Her eyes ahead and up, she looked up into the sun. But I, I kept looking back into my darkest dreams, and it was my words which would not let her be. And so, she disappeared, into my damned underworld. I walked back into a cold, prosaic light. Now in the day, my stories tear at me. They tear my limbs, freeze my soul, burn my brain, and leave me with a shattered, scattered, solitary heart.