odalisques & the ocean

There are many things in my life which begin with the letter O.  O radiant heaven, an odalisque in an obelisk lives near the ocean!  You can see this on the map of where I live, posted on the about page.  The ocean is to the East, which means the sun rises out of it, and the moon.  As you can see from the map, there is a sand path sifted out of dunes that runs to the shore.  I have not yet taken it.

I have not left the obelisk.

From my high position, I see everything around me.  But vantage obscures detail, scope excludes intimacy (as the birds know, from their dreams).   I am not intimated in the sift of sand, the sting of salt.   I am not intimated in the shore’s cemetery, where the sea spits up its dead, only to scarf them down again.

I cannot always see the ocean from my window and this is fortunate because when I can see it, it demands all my attention.    I do not understand how people live right on the ocean because I do not understand how, if they live there, they accomplish anything.   The ocean demands attention, its variant surfaces of mood and weather, its volume, its aggression and retreat.  Fluctuation is its constant, yet, on solid earth,  it orients the movement of stars– I watch astronomical bodies revolve over it.

Ships never appear, wrecked in storms and on rocks, no doubt.  Lured by turbulent dreaming, the imaginary things with which we populate the earth’s teeming, indifferent mess.   Whirlpools.  Sirens.  Storm gods.  Monstrous sea-snakes.   Full fathom five who there lies?  Pearls and monsters are more palatable than fact: the ocean seethes with crepuscular carnage.   Tier upon tier of species, bioluminescent or dark as shadows, colorful as glass or amorphous.  Furred, tentacled, wormy, lidless, blind,  all feed on one another.   Swallow.  Scavenge.  Catabolize excrement.

I watch the ocean when it is in the window of my obelisk.

The birds say it is very pleasant on the shore, when the sun is middling high and breezes blow.  That I should put on some clothes and go for a stroll.  Take a parasol.  Some scissors.  A picnic.  A towel.

But I have not walked there.  I have not walked there.

One day I will go.

–The Odalisque