The Last Day

Not a Poem, a paragraph.

It's the last day. It doesn't just sneak up on you, it's protracted: you think you'll turn around and trip over the re-packed bags, stumble into the car and ship off to the airport before you even know what hit you, but it's not like that. The days shuffle out like ballerinas, one by one, into the light and then the shadows, and by the halfway point you feel like you're on the last girl. She's shining in the light and spinning, and as her beauty fades with the house-lights you can tell there's no way anyone can follow her and glisten as she does. And it's true: by days five and six, the furrows in the waves don't feel real anymore, the planks on the back of the deck bend with rot and wear, but don't seem old. Each day feels new, a novice on the stage, a chorus girl out of an impossible assortment of replacements, all resplendent, ample, unblemished but too common to be cherished. Day seven and you feel the week has just been born when it's at its end. You decide to stay another several days. Each one of these is an excruciating death. You want to cry but you can only weakly nod into the winds, grasping for them as they toss your hair like seaweed and trace the shallow lines across your cheek that they've already made. You'd vomit, collapse into the rotting deck, but instead you're cheery and cordial and you crave a moment in the stars at night when you can race out into the clean crisp storm gusts and the crashing in the sea three hundred feet below to weep without restraint into the cushion on the lounge chair, but you settle for a little bubble in the eye and then return inside without a fight. You're controlled, the days, the dancing, when the sky and sea and wind are chaos, hell, they pull you here and there, rip you into pieces that no-one can see, that you can't even feel, you're all glued together by salt and spit and time and waste and passengers could tread on you like a fresh built ship and you wouldn't creak or bend or give. Day nine and some little girl dances adagio in makeshift sweeps of her pink and silky arms, her pointed legs, protracted steps, so slow it doesn't seem to happen and it rushes by in a forgotten moment. The lights are off, she's not performing, she wasn't even cast. It's before she's ever had a lesson. She sinks into the sea of audience, applause she'll never get and the shouts and murmurs wash right over and she's never seen or heard or felt, as if she never lived. I look out through the floor to ceiling window, out past the deck that's pretty much intact, up through the white poles that form a line across the ocean, enclosing all our land on every side, the sun dipping into smoky clouds on the upper right hand corner. It's like a ship, like the house that Hemingway said was like a ship. His character ran into the Second World War, and he had to leave. I haven't finished the book yet. I wonder how it ends. Still, seems lucky to have started here.