caught

Tonight the ocean on TV, dark blue water and wide-clouded blue sky and a boat going up and down over the choppy waves.

I know that boat smells like rotten fish, and I know you could chop off a finger or two on the gear it carries. Live lobsters pinch; and they stay dangerous even when they're dead, when they're boiled red, black eyes sightless but shells still hard. Even after you pull off the thick wet rubber bands from the lifeless claws you cut your fingers, no matter how careful you are when you crack and bend the shells to get to the meat that you'll dip into butter bubbled white on top, the little metal cup of butter that makes a dark stain on the wood of the picnic table. You go too fast and cut yourself and those little lobsterspine cuts will sting for days.

I doubt I'd last a day on a lobster boat, but I long for it anyway, long to lie in bed at night feeling like I'm still rising and falling with the boat over the water, limbs tired after a day of physical work, eyes dry from the wind, skin sunburned tight.

Or at least I long for that picnic table, the sweet reward of a slow meal, the table set on a rocky beach with boats resting at anchor, and mountains blue beyond the bay, the fishermen at rest, too, gone home to their dinners and beds.

I can't describe how much I miss it, the shock of the cold Atlantic numbing my feet at the beach, the water coming in and going out around my cold white skin, how it looks like I'm what's moving, not the sand and the water. Watching the fishing boats move from trap to trap with their clouds of gulls and their blaring radios, circling, circling.

I miss the sea-and-skyline, the neverending noise of wind and water, the bell buoy calling, lonely, bobbing in an empty patch of dark blue sea.