| Curtain of Salt
in the rock and tossed into the bronze-green cove at the creek mouth, a lame and hasty offering of remembrance black-tarred currachs upturned on the pier different in no meaningful way from St. Brendan’s mad craft how far down Brandon’s Creek might a brown trout drift before it scented the curtain of salt and turned its course back upstream? what was lacking in the fall of water down this slope that made Brendan forget he too was a fresh water creature and sent him wandering beyond the curtain of salt? what rose most ferociously in his breast, terror joy sadness devotion or the collective pulse of his companions, when his oxhide boat sailed west tracking a story? did tears coat his salt-eaten flesh when he sighted the deep gash in the cliffs as he finally bobbed back into this bronze-green cove at the mouth of this creek after seven years adrift? you slump into your own delicious weeping beside the currachs and know you’d just as soon sprout gills and fins and flop into the cool fresh waters of the creek or grow your hair long and blend in with the sheep to munch contented on the precarious green, scratch your backside against ragged fence posts, and step gingerly over your own droppings along the rim of the cliffs above the cove and never imagine any mode of leaving __________ "Curtain of Salt" appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Main Street Rag. |