Barbara Crooker

The sky hangs up its starry pictures: a swan, a crab, a horse. And even though you’re three hundred miles away, I know you see them, too. Right now, my side of the bed is empty, a clear blue lake of flannel. The distance yawns and stretches. It’s hard to remember we swim in an ocean of great love, so easy to fall into bickering like little birds at the feeder fighting over proso and millet, unaware of how large the bag of grain is, a river of golden seeds, that the harvest was plentiful, the corn is in the barn, and whenever we’re hungry, a dipperful of just what we need will be spilled . . .

It’d been a long winter, rags of snow hanging on; then, at the end of April, an icy nor’easter, powerful as a hurricane. But now I’ve landed on the coast of Maine, visiting a friend who lives two blocks from the ocean, and I can’t believe my luck, out this mild morning, race-walking along the strand. Every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running for the sheer dopey joy of it. No one’s in the water, but walkers and shellers leave their tracks on the hardpack. The flat sand shines as if varnished in a painting. Underfoot, strewn, are broken bits and pieces, deep indigo mussels, whorls of whelk, chips of purple and white wampum, hinges of quahog, fragments of sand dollars. Nothing whole, everything broken, washed up here, stranded. The light pours down, a rinse of lemon on a cold plate. All of us, broken, some way or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.

We’re writing our names with sizzles of light to celebrate the fourth. I use the loops of cursive, make a big B like the sloping hills on the west side of the lake. The rest, little a,r, one small b, spit and fizz as they scratch the night. On the side of the shack where we bought them, a handmade sign: Trailer Full of Sparkles Ahead, and I imagine crazy chrysanthemums, wheels of fire, glitter bouncing off metal walls. Here, we keep tracing in tiny pyrotechnics the letters we were given at birth, branding them on the air. And though my mother’s name has been erased now, I write it, too: a big swooping I, a hissing s, an a that sighs like her last breath, and then I ring belle, belle, belle in the sulphuric smoky dark.

is a river you wade in until you get to the other side. But I am here, stuck in the middle, water parting around my ankles, moving downstream over the flat rocks. I'm not able to lift a foot, move on. Instead, I'm going to stay here in the shallows with my sorrow, nurture it like a cranky baby, rock it in my arms. I don't want it to grow up, go to school, get married. It's mine. Yes, the October sunlight wraps me in its yellow shawl, and the air is sweet as a golden Tokay. On the other side, there are apples, grapes, walnuts, and the rocks are warm from the sun. But I'm going to stand here, growing colder, until every inch of my skin is numb. I can't cross over. Then you really will be gone.