Goodbye my sweet sting, the sea I hide behind my eyes, the rivers of life coursing within me. Wave after ocean wave, you have gone from seaside holiday spray to nightmares where the bitterness lashes at the rigging and my lips feel the kiss of the sea long after a sweated sleep. The deer seek you out, their shadows moving through forests for that one rock to lick that will give them life. I no longer have a salt shaker on my table, and what the heart cannot tolerate or the internal organs absorb, becomes a lover’s poison of pain. I cannot kiss your crying eyes so I will try not to make you weep. Movies where we sat with a bag of salted popcorn are now their stories rather than their taste, and if I thirst it is not because of what I ate but because my body is a freshwater lake, cool and waiting to dissolve beneath a blanket of clouds the way stars dissolve when daylight comes and we part without tears.
An Aubade to Salt
