Chapter Six: My Dreams and the Sea (Part Two)
[Just a warning, this is a super rough draft. Read Chapter Six Part One here. Or want to start the story? Read Chapter one part one here and a table of contents here]
The sea has two smiles.
She smiles in the gossamer webs of her morning;
in her delights as she laughs on the rocks.
Below the warble and din of the gulls.
She smiles in delight at the child with a small green pale, who tries to
empty her, bucket by bucket, upon the land.
Her mirth laps the skiffs of lovers as they lay upon the
world-lake. She is a grin amidst the
heat of the day as she cools the weary.
Her face in light and evening alike, a serene mind reflecting noon’s
warmth and the night’s infinite mystery. She smiles like a servant as she gives fish to
the hungry; her graceful croon whispering amongst the cluttered niches of
anxious souls seeking peace. She smiles
like a goddess.
And then, she smiles amongst storms. Laughs among the stranded dashed to bits on
reef and rock and roaring tide. She
sings with S.O.S calls; her mirth laps upon snapping anchor line. She is joyful as her waves try to swallow the
sky by their sublime mountains. Revels
at the treasures now within her bosom.
She is but a dancer when pushed forever inland by tremor and quake. Mirth and whimsy amongst typhoon. Onward, ever onward as she climbs above lungs
she dances, free. A smile of cobalt and
iron. Steel gray swell. She is musical in depth and umbra; a rumor of
the infinite in her unending soliloquy.
__________________________
Day two.
It is nature’s vanity to dispossess a dream,
invading the senses with its beauty, thundering in upon slowly stirring
movements. You awaken to the sunrise
gleaming, reflected in the shallow mirrors of your eyes. As if creation was jealous, quickly trying to
push away whatever phantom glamor, whichever ideality you conjured as you
slept; the day makes it deliquescent, and your fantasy, melts into shadow
stained earth and disappears. This
conspiracy of blooming nature washes it away.
And the dream whimpers into something you barely remember you
forget.
The morn and the dream form a chrestomathy; your
sleep addled stupor, forces you to choose between them. The pale husk of night wanders away dejected,
away, beyond, apart from this newly rising light.
It was cold in the early mornings, but
refreshingly so. And every morning there
was fog, lumbering in from the reaches where the ocean threw itself to oblivion
against the horizon, and every morning a breeze pricked with the brine and salt
of the steel gray Pacific would swell like music and open the hidden magnitude
of the sky over the waters. Above the
fog disappearing like ghosts into their graves, dawn’s jaws opened, and the
colors were choruses, coaxing the rocks and dunes from their lumbering
silhouettes. And all the forests in the hills and mountains were gleaming like
great pillars of Autumn which had long since bled from the heavens onto the
leaves of trees. Like Homer wrote, the
rosy-fingered dawn greets you with its breathing, sweeping causeways of the
sea’s voice arching, the approaching ocean shallow’s flowing, foaming fingers
and arms of icy waters embracing. So sudden.
Yet those woebegone moments, the theophany,
dreamt messiahs departing—those dreams you had before reality wakes you stay in
a moment; in the infinitesimal calculus between waking and dreaming there is
that echo, where the dream’s one last gasping hallelujah rings, where life is
laid bare in the vestiges still lingering with you like a long forgotten lyric,
an emotion, a beautiful melodic immensity hung beneath heaven’s opening sky.
I opened my eyes to the sea, but my dream still
stayed.
I was Adam.
In the moment of this final dream.
And you were Eve, in this apocalypse.
There was a rush, of pale winters
wind, shrill. Chaotic.
A quickening motion, infinite cobalt
oceans, their ashen waves outpouring, the white tipped and ever-roaring giants,
like mountains suddenly born to then die in collapse, as valleys beneath ever
new mounting shadow and bulk; all their
lace of elegant froth, vicious beauties conspiring with those solemn pillars of
wisps and fog from the falling sky.
Blooming orchestras of vortex and mist.
They all rose and choired and clamored around the pane of the world.
Churning above, below, the horizon line.
And you and I, we were entities
departing. Like two cells in the sea;
two spots in the storm. We stood in the sand, in the dream, and we were two
motions drifting. I felt like a lighthouse
helplessly rotating its light; stuck, jammed upon its rock and damned to but
revolve. And but watch as my torch was
held high. And the sea around me,
amongst the bromide kissed edifices, in my luminous torsion, only laughed and
lapped as you sped away through dark and waves.
A slighter dark in the darkness, moving, finding the horizon.
And God came down, down in the
rains, the bog. He was a regretful sky,
an air curiously cold; he was a grandeur that was the weight of all creation,
the firmament arch, the taste, the morning chill, he was in the horizon born
from the retreating stars and murk, falling upon the bluffs. He approached me
like a sadness that could sink mountains beneath the sea.
Where
are you, his moan spoke, like a question.
Answered only by the sharp silence
of my broken tongue.
It
was her Lord, I blamed with my voice pointing into the rage and swiftness
of shifting sky and waters. She did this.
But I knew that was a lie. We were
dead before this. I remember. I remember.
And
in the dream the angels, all those ageless ancients patiently waiting,
monoliths ever-guarding the previously undivided edge of Eden: How they looked at me and wept at a paradise,
now forever lost, their silver spirits now but bitter obloquy. They became gray prisms, the color-spectrums
dullest verge. Echoes of ours. God, we gave them tragedy. God, we drew for them their knives. There was
light like the flutter of wings. And the verdant arcs of land retreated as Eden
began to be lost amongst prolific sands.
I reached out. I rotated,
helpless.
The angels, their swords burst to flame.
In the dream, God peered upon
me. And my bowed whispering frame,
between clasped hands, in the dream, was failing.
Lord,
Lord. I cried. But He did not know
me.
Paradise blew away, like vapors of
smoke.
And I was stranded, where storms
wrinkle and wane.
And the Sons of the Morning, those
angelic stars stood between me and the garden, astride me and paradise.
I awoke.
And remembered.
In the beginning, God breathed symphonies and
creation was its chorus of notes.
And then I was a beloved silence nature kept as
it moved; a wandering son of God tossed from Eden’s stretches, that secret upon
the lips of the sea, the sand’s soundless friend as I walked in stupor.
When I was dead I walked.
And the sea walked with me.
I was storm and it was tumult.
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