Speech

This is our common language: rockface, smooth and listing to the sea, the cove waves slapping at our feet; the lobster buoys, fewer off this shore; and sea swells, whose deep undulations we can almost feel, this island drifting us to where it stays. We learn to speak by speaking, and we learn not to praise the rockface for its smoothness nor the waves for smallness, nor the swells for pulling us toward sleep; for these are things we only think, remembering, to tell another how it could not be. No one will be told, nor will we recall our casual, long dialogue of silence, motion, stillness, and few words, like nothing at all but what it is -- the herons calling out across the cov e, but not the call.