Low Tide

It’s slow-going sometimes. We laugh about it when we’re walking back home, placing our steps carefully between the cracks in the sidewalk. Hair brushed aside, a small shiver –switchgrass moving in the breeze. And we pull tighter, gloves wrapped around frozen fingers. Like children really, just moving through the day past yard after yard. And you say you know it’ll be better, and I know too. Things come one at a time, in lines and bunches, however really we get a hold of them. Hooded and quiet, toe first, stepping a dance then lightly rushing forward, knowing bad luck when you see it. In my pockets, I reach for an answer, lines and rolling syllables, and I say there’s a way out. The dog thick with new life tracks us down the street, slinking by cars and trashcans. I’m too used to lying about the ways the earth turns, the stars determine. The truth is sometimes I’m not too sure. I bite my fingers and hold back that fear I know from those Tuesdays when you look at me, saying there’s an overhanging dark. I can feel it in the gloaming, in the wavering night, when day doesn’t know. It’s a secret thing – closets, locked dressers, backrooms. And I want to say don’t look, don’t think about it, but it’s so cold that our eyes turn down to keep the frost out, our heads touch together and we entwine like fingers, and it’s forced upon us. Shadows pushing us ever nearer the light. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to see, and so we walk in silence, not knowing how to explain the slowness of the tide and the ever widening distance between where we are and where we know we were always meant to be.