The Stargazer
Part 1: The Channel

We found a dead Stargazer
offered up by the tide
near the entrance to Bull Cove.
A bloated fleshy blob
with sharp rows of small teeth
like tiny jagged mountain ranges
and blank milky eyes that stared
up to the heavens like some forlorn saint.
The skin was spotted and pretty
like stars.
It seemed so out of place on the beach
lost in the bright rays.
And still, even in death
gazing up at our one big star,
the noonday sun.

Back at the farmhouse-
in an old book about the Chesapeake Bay-
I found it again.
They are bottom dwellers,
tucking and wriggling themselves safely into the deep sandy folds of the belly
of our largest estuary.
I wondered if they care,
as the name suggests,
about faraway sunlit
constellations squinting
through stained glass moonbeams
and twinkling facets
of gentle lapping waters?

The Stargazer got me thinking
about things that are deep inside me-
things that emerge from my depths.
Crimson shiny pomegranate masses
and ruby red libations that plop plop plop
like the plump gelatinous dead fish
sacrificed by the tide
and now laid out
in water’s solemn wake.
We become the curious mourners
to this impromptu viewing.

It’s a remnant of the story,
just as shooting stars
burn through the atmosphere,
a burial mound of the ancient ones hidden in plain sight.
Evidence of the old legends
washing up from the great beyond.
Persephone’s journey to the unknown.
A brief encounter with something sacred.

I think about the
persisting
swaying
abiding
abrading
current
pouring
through the channel,
back and forth every day.
That avenue of tides,
faithfully filling the cove
and emptying again.
Like breathing.
Or a snake shedding skin,
or the moon shedding light.
Or the baby
that sought his way out of me
on his birth-day quietly like Moses
attending destiny
carried swiftly through the rushes.

And I think of the creatures
lining the entrance of the channel-
oysters and mussels in the hard clay.
Like soldiers,
ancestors
guardians.
Flat rays skim the shallows,
snails rise and retreat
up and down the grasses.
All in perfect rhythm –
a silent infinite metronome.

If I lay my body down in the sand,
will I be transposed into this divinity?
Yes.

The channel takes you inside the cove
to the time before humanity
when thought was silent
and consciousness was sleeping.