Thalassography

I have known these estuaries — the channels and canals, the backwaters that flush and eddy to the Pacific, I have skimmed that muddied slurry, felt the nip in the throat where the salt in the air is the salt of the coast, I have tacked where the tide is incomplete: no rollers and breakers, only an ebb that rocks the wayfarers — a rush of silver, the gavel-smack of mullet in the night, mud crabs elbowing denwards under concrete slabs of boat ramps — I have stalked where herons stilt and spear baitfish in green afternoons, cast crab pots in loose analemmas to watch the black sonar spread, tracked prawn trawlers on the broadwater crawling back in the lavender dawn then sat at the jetty’s edge and shucked those tiger shells, cast sucked heads back into the dark, crushed mussel shell underfoot for the burn of sharpened chitin, stepped where stingrays wallow and idle, shuffling their barbs, waiting to strike. I have spent half my life in low tide — nights where I have not known if I am contracting or dragging out again, where the movement of the water is the movement of my mind — unending comings and goings of sounds and narrows, those entry points to my two continents — and my history is the history of currents: a canal small enough to catch a childhood in its net, water vast enough to divide a life.