Boat People

And there it was, the body, one single man’s body, broken like a sack of bones and meat dropped from heaven, floating quiet on the immense flatness of the sea, that big slow-breathing mother-ocean stretching out forever under the low grey sky, no ripple, no hurry, just the long swell lifting him and letting him down again, gentle as a drunk’s sigh.

No fight left in him, no scream, no prayer—just the body riding the water like a cork, arms out, face turned half to the clouds, half to the water, eyes open but seeing nothing now, nothing at all. The ocean didn’t hate him, didn’t love him didn’t even know his name. It just carried him, the way it carries dead whales and busted ships and all the lost things that ever fell into it.

No alliance between man and ocean.

Man thinks he can wrestle the sea, thinks he can sign a treaty with it, but the sea just keeps breathing, slow and old and patient, and when a man finally goes under or floats broken on top, the sea doesn’t gloat, doesn’t mourn. It just rolls on, vast and mighty, the same as it was before the first man ever looked at it and felt small.

And the body floated there, turning a little with the current, alone in all that calm power, a tiny punctuation mark at the end of a sentence the ocean never bothered to write.

the Sunday papers,
trying to cross the channel,
makeshift dinghy.