The Hush of the Very Good

You can tell by how he lists to let her kiss him, that the getting, as he gets it, is good. It’s good in the sweetly salty, deeply thirsty way that a sea-fogged rain is good after a summer-long bout of inland drought. And you know it when you see it, don’t you? How it drenches what’s dry, how the having of it quenches. There is a grassy inlet where your ocean meets your land, a slip that needs a certain kind of vessel, and when that shapely skiff skims in at last, trimmed bright, mast lightly flagging left and right, then the long, lush reeds of your longing part, and soft against the hull of that bent wood almost im- perceptibly brushes a luscious hush the heart heeds helplessly— the hush of the very good.