There is a fist of reef that grips the island’s shore that I have come to know. It sits between two rivers that spill their silt and centuries to the sea, their channels that cut like bookends around a library of words. It sits like a crown of coral and stone, sweeps like the tangle of hair across the back of a naked lover in the sheets.
There, in a knuckle known only by a precious few, a wave bends across an unseen knoll and turns inward on itself. Its surface turns to bowels as lips swallow skin. In between, it stands tall like a velodrome’s wall. Then the world turns concave, a hollow cylinder like a teardrop that horseshoes and bends. Speed twists its knobs. Water spills off the shelf and the sea stands erect. Aquamarine bleeds to cobalt, and every blue ever known by both sky and by sea in the gradients between. The blade that separates earth from sky is for a moment not flat but a heaving wedge. It contorts the world to a portal that churns heroes from men. The sky rises and the sea falls, its space shifts, tweaking time.
This sea she does roll. In her I dissolve. She rises up and I am lifted, she falls and I sink. There is a bubble around the earth that cuts me in two. My legs gyrate below, twisted appendages that I no longer possess. In the way of aquariums and funhouse mirrors they wiggle and squirm. Distant serpents of the sea. Coral heads of pink and white scroll underneath, like the stars that trail circles through the arc of the night. The wind holds her breath, daring not to exhale. A coat of glass has been dripped on the sea like wax from a candle held sideways to the wind. My open palm turns to trace it, fingertips across smooth skin that holds everything in. It is a caress too huge to be seen with eyes left unshut, too sacred to be held in a moment framed in time. My sense of touch is like the universe in its first moments as it bursted out through the void. Every nerve turns to yellow as they skate across glass, naked hips where they curve, a swollen belly that splits with life. There is a pulse to this temple, a heartbeat within. It ebbs and flows like a sine wave, rolling rhythms entrained. Cells as they divide, new life as its birthed. All that exists and will be resonates in harmony, like the silver tone of a meditation bell that outlasts the monks’ ohms’ last breath.
There is a rock that marks this bend in the reef, the spinning pinwheels outside. It sits partially submerged all alone when the tide is high, surrounded by sand and coated with children when the sea recedes. I park by it and climb down, my trucks’ wheels trailing a wake in the muddy puddle as the engine quits. I stare off in the silence. A rain falls in the predawn morning. Feathered licks of pink crack the terrestrial grey and all it enshrouds. A rumbling presence in the distance. So many voices as they call, patients, family, and the sea. But her whispers beckon loudest, her elusive kiss the most true.
Yet she too demands her price. Her knife-sharpened floor scrapes blood from my flesh and cuts lines in my hands. Her white walls of foam steal the breath from my lungs. Her curtains of lead fall like the hooded blades of axes as I dive deep when she unloads.
But sometimes they slow. And sometimes they slope. And I spin and I dig and paddle hard with every ounce of my body’s weight leaning forward, pressing hard on the gas. Then she peaks and inverts and the whole of the ocean flings itself forward across the reef’s fist that holds clenched. I jump to my feet, the rush of wind down the face from its throat across my ears. Every molecule of water in its right place. My three fins as they cut. The tail as it drives. My board’s rail as it engages. The unnamed muscles between all ten of my toes tense and flexed as they hold fast their grip.
I arc off the wall where it bleeds to the flats and tuck into the pocket where I hook and am locked. And there, where the curve of the ocean bends like the cupped hand of God, I stand perched between His curling fingers and outstretched thumb, a curtain of green light as it expands and swallows me whole. Time slows and turns to crystal. Past and future collapse to now.
Every cell and the sinew and the crimson glue between pulse in the same cadence as the sea. They weave their threads through the bending waves of light cooked hot by the sun. They unfurl with the tongues of newborn ferns. They lift off in a quiet trail of steam from the green dew. They drop weightless in vertical rivers and carve wrinkles in the soil. And they rise up in a cloud of mist and foam that explodes on oval marbles cooled from lava and sprinkled about.
We are all the same, this sea and this land and this wave as it bends. This knuckle of reef where it flexes, this nameless kink I have come to know through the years. This rock that marks the channel where my car’s tires rut the mud. This rain as it falls. This paddle out and this paddle in. This waiting. This rolling. These triangles as they bend and these wedges that morph to walls. This dragon as she grows and she swallows and she growls. This skeleton glued in hope that spins, digs, leans, and chases. This hair as it dries and then wets, remembers and forgets.
Its skinny follicles cling to this naked skull as a man does the Earth. So much trouble bounces within its hollow walls.
Only here it is allowed the sacred space to forget.