Without an alarm built of harp arcs, I wouldn’t wake.

Or I would wake, of course, but not to do more than sit and watch the ocean carry on breathing.

Not breathing but whitecaps. Rolling in untangled poses. My body does not ask anything but to see each release.

The sky moves from thick blue to a blouse of fog.

Such a distance from my love, and here, silence is company. I’m arguing with it. Though I’ve been given to calm, I can’t help hearing the points of my past line up with their old regrets and emotions.

I’m beginning to see how tender what’s ripped apart. This is how memory works, isn’t it?

Tell me again, Marie, what good comes of it.

When the last of the parents died, my sister said Orphan. Said No one. Said Unmappable. Scary. But you know that breaking is not boundary.

Today rearranges. Already honed.

Many days of fog. I saw one quarter of the view erase. Flatness. I’d been seeing what I could not see so often, and now I saw what I had seen as what I hadn’t loved before. I spooned to it, pried it open.

Within, I saw softening.

Marie, such measure and naming in the horizontal world. Such obedient digging to find the stubborn shift of unerring existence.

Our bodies of water, our bodies of bodies, pick apart and go on with the work.

It’s weird how slowly the earth moves. Evolution and eons and hundreds of thousands of layers of slowness. I’ve cried oceans in these last three years. Oceans before that for other reasons that changed what I saw as my own formation. Oceans to people my body keeps missing.

You saw how to be bare. How to loosen a hold and how even a hole in that hold could still feel like touching.

Sandhill cranes race the inlet, stay awhile, then announce their synchronized leaving.

One day with five others I took a boat to the flint and stone bay, the water in outspoken swords, indicting. Banging, sustained. We were scared, if it be told and in ecstasy with the brutal looping-over, the near-spill, the soon field of submersion.

I picture you, Marie, waking to make maps of what seemed plain water, bottom register. Though you were zippered to facts, not the adventure, you sat in the plot of sounding valleys and overlayed epicenters until the blood side of evenings. You entangled

in the diligent tack to the same rifts west to east. Those points ceaseless. Without instruction you did this, wanting to sharpen a deep range of linking to a long decoupling—less scar than realignment.

Absurd to think it could be jarred apart, breached, the ocean, ample as it was.

Stout sweep of water.

Let’s get this over with—I have failed many times, every way (from love to the deepest of envy) and by this I mean I have failed to invest in the unstable elemental. I’ve never gone all the way down, wanton with the intent to unstitch. Never drawn my brawling signature in blood or yolk.

But you, Marie, you took hours to probe. No temptation to stop. All those blisters of what had ceded, a middle hinder. Everywhere: vast and hidden.

I am living in a cabin with one cup, one bowl and one plate. Oh Marie, let’s talk about stamina.

How did you manage it? Despite all life’s to do lists, you still tracked the world’s wet backbone.

The fog climbs the spruces. Alder rushes streetsides above ditches when I walk each sunset. Sometimes I shiver and return to the windows to watch the ocean’s open palm. Summer is already ending. It all seems

unknowable. What is an end and how is it different from a darkening? Marie, what is survival?