How To Commit To Life

How To Commit To Life

You head toward the mud. It’s a habit.
You’re not a great blue-heron, you just
like the way it feels between your toes
and the challenge of staying upright.
The mud is full of dead things,
most of them unrecognizable.
Under the bridge, no one can see you.
For once, the water doesn’t reflect anything.
You’re safe. You push your thoughts away
before shame sends you running back to the
yellow house looking for some errand that has to
get done right away or the world will fall apart, right?
You pray for instinct to lay its hands upon you.
Your hands reach down and pluck three bits of broken
china from the mosaic of oyster and clam shells
decorating the mudflats.
The air is thick as water, if you didn’t know better
you’d think you had gills and could flash by this scene
like the schools of minnows who flee under this
bridge when the sun is bright in summer.
The blue willow painted on the surface makes you weep.
Champ plunges a clam rake off the dock to your right.
No distractions, you say to yourself.
You close your mind to the gentle humor in his face.
You don’t let yourself think of how you love to watch the seals
get knocked off the rocks by the waves.
On the left, two great black-backed gulls squabble over
a flounder, plucked live out of the shallow water.
They tear its guts out as it flaps on the flat
with their livid yellow beaks.
You’ve been careful to hide what you’re feeling
as you went about your daily business, maybe
with a little less purpose than everyone else,
but with enough verve that no one suspects you
when you hoist yourself up on to the bridge and
look down at the current, your eyes seeking
the center of a whirlpool for a clear sign.
You don’t see the surface, only what’s beneath.
All of you calls to the rocks, to the ripples,
to the currents crashing at the tip of the island,
to every wave that has broken on every beach.
You raise your face.
The wind from the north blows through you.
A dissonant chord rings.
You move closer to the edge as it dissolves,
clashing against the solid walls of guts and liver and kidneys.
But then they break down--your organs--and your
rebellious cells pull you back from the edge with a will
you hadn’t known they had. You have.
Silence arcs toward you in the form of a gull as sure of its way
as a boomerang that flies out into space and turns back without resisting.
The gull returns to the flounder, still flopping on the mudflat.
It won’t be long now.
How will you ever be able to say what made you
step off the bridge and walk back to the yellow house on the hill,
past the rock painted with the American flag,
where for the first time, the word freedom isn’t ironic?
All you can say is the mallard with the emerald green head
swam side by side with his drab mate.
All you can say is my heart is not these three bits
of broken china plucked from the mud by instinct.