Chincoteague
So it turns out small birds actually exist. I’ve seen them, on the eastern shore. Not blue, like those little animated ones circling Snow White as she sang the scales. They’re mostly white, with feathers edged in black lace. And tiny, so small they could almost disappear in the foam if they didn’t travel at least in pairs.
The beach flowed north and south, its lines so straight as they disappeared into the distance they could make you dizzy if you stared too long. Waves came in the wrong direction. I’m used to the Pacific and orient myself to the world by swells rising from the west. These threw me off balance.
Only her sun hat kept me standing: round, woven, almost of the same straw that grew from the dunes behind us. Her hand, held to its brim, broke the glare. Her shoulders helped keep me steady. Always the pearls, but today set off by the printed flowers of her suit, by the long scarf she’d draped around her waist, held by a single knot.
Canoes were waiting in the backwater bay. It didn’t take long to get there. She preferred green. I loved them once, moved around lakes as if their skin were mine, fishing. But my muscles had forgotten the rhythm, and here there were no trees to block the wind. At last, they remembered, and we began to move towards the marshes on the opposite bank.
Why were the horses so small? Why did we try to land? The earth seemed an illusion: as soon as I stepped onto it, grass dissolved into water. I tried again, tried to pull the canoe up. It just kept floating: even a small breeze could turn the hull. I decided to try the inlet’s unbearable silence.
The water was smoother there. Looking back, I could see my paddle’s vortexes spinning away from each other. The only sounds were the buzzing of marsh flies and the breath of the horses as we drew closer. They looked bigger from slightly below and became more than images, their rough coats real, their muscles actually rippling as they moved along the edge. I know you think the stallions are dangerous, but it’s the lead mare to watch. She could swamp you in a moment and turn you into a water creature. It’s not your world.
We moved from island to island, from horse to horse. A south wind kept driving us from the landing. I knew we’d have to face it, I knew it was time. She turned us straight into it, kept us on course. My strength propelled us. The wind kept rising. We didn’t make it till noon.
Photo taken by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Back to the beach, over the dunes with my burden: lawn chairs, books, an umbrella big enough to shield the sun. Her chair seemed almost like a burnished throne, facing east, attended now by those same small birds, circling, pretending to look for food. I read like a common osprey, scanning the lines for fish. Every so often, I’d dive down with my pen, underlining, dashing a paragraph.
I never know what to look for. I’m easily distracted. Sometimes I look up and just stare into the distance. It was easy there, an afternoon mist hazed everything at less then a mile. I was doing exactly that, gazing into the emptiness, when I thought I saw shadows. I convinced myself they were nothing, a trick of the eye, my mind desiring to see something, anything, to fabricate a reality. But they were moving, and moving towards us.
They became more real with every step. I could tell it wasn’t me bringing them into existence. They were engaged in their own creation, and just as in the marsh, they were rough, angular sketches of horse, reduced. The birds saw them too, and fled back to their breakers, back to flying the lines between the swells, seeming at random.
I could see more than outlines now, the colors, white, a kind of rust-red brown, patches of black sometimes. One seemed almost Arabian. They didn’t match my idea, they were painted rather than grown, pieced together, but walking, tentative, wavering. A few stood in the water or lifted a foreleg through a wave. But they kept coming, moving towards us, towards her.
When I say she’s magic, no-one ever believes me. They expect a mist swirling around her, a face wrapped in light, rays on her gown, or a woman rising naked from the foam, a fire stirring near her when she stirs, burning clearly, even in darkness. But it’s not like that at all. It’s a small wind. You have to make yourself very still to feel it. And even then, you can’t feel the wind itself directly. You can only feel the tiny hairs on your wrist moving. But once you know it’s real, you learn what to look for. You learn to see what’s drawn to her.
The horses were getting closer. What could they want? Maybe they were me and just desired to be near her, to feel the effects of the wind. They stopped a few feet away. They stood there, fully formed, breathing.
The birds decided it was safe to come back and actually landed on the sand. By now it was late afternoon and the sun was behind us. Everything seemed still, as if the world had stopped. Only the breakers kept moving, and even their motion was always the same. I don’t know how long the spell lasted. How could I, when I was involved in it? Do figures in a painting keep time?
But when the long shadows of single trees on the dunes edged past us, the birds were the first to move. They got jittery, twittering at last, one lifted his wings, and all the rest followed. Back to combing the lines.
The horses, reluctant, went over the dunes heading for the marsh. She closed the umbrella. I took up my strange burden again.
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W.F. Lantry was born near the Pacific Ocean, lived and sailed along the shore of a midland sea, walked the coast of a southern gulf and now lives near an ocean far from home. In 2010 he won the Birmingham-Southern College National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, Crucible Poetry Prize, CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize and Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (in Israel). His chapbook, The Language of Birds, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, and work has appeared in James Dickey Review, The Tower Journal, Kestrel, blue five notebook and Aesthetica. He is a contributing editor of Umbrella. His website is http://wflantry.com/
