Words and Silence

Sometimes words seem like the lake or the ocean when there is a a sudden change of wind or a large freighter goes by and pulls the water out behind it, sending in a recoil wave after it has gone by. I feel as a child holding on the the side of a pleasure boat, ready to let go and step down a short distance to the clean, fine sand that carpets the bay where we are anchored, only to discover that, even though the sun is bright in a cloudless sky, the wind has pushed broadside against the craft or a wave has washed in, and the anchor has lost its bit and began to drag slowly out to deeper water. When I let loose, there is no bottom. I sense the onset of panic, feet expecting soft sand and finding only more water. The sun reflects off the white paint of the hull, exaggerating the splendor of the day; the shallow blue of the water gives way a lightly green with sandy tan, and I go down and find the bottom, and the surface is over my head. The sand is dirty and sucks at my toes.
I jet back up. Everywhere I look there are people playing and swimming; the sun is undiminished; there is laughter dripping in my ears with the water.
Someone pulls on the anchor to make it bite into the sand. Someone stares at me, and I begin to swim to the ladder hanging off the boat.
Words are like that. You may feel panic, and there is no bottom. Our anchors do not bite into the ground and a boat full of laughing people - friends and relatives - chock full of coolers with sodas and beer and barbecue roasting of the small tartan grills begins to float away.
There is an undertow that pulls us, and it throbs like words that cannot calm our fears.

That night, I lay unsleeping and stare through the large screened windows at the fireflies in three dimensions against a backdrop of the blinking range lights that guide the river traffic in front of my Grandmother's house. The boat is secured for the night in the boathouse, and that structure is dark as a coalsack.
During the day a boathouse is lit from below, the sun beating down and penetrating the water around it and shining up to light the interior with a pneumatic type of light unseen anywhere else in the world... a hydraulic lifting of the dusky solitude inside the boathouse; a uncanny light bouncing off the water and the river bed and creating a halo around the hull of that fickle, sometimes run-away boat.
So I muse now, at rest, wondering why I panicked, or almost panicked. I did not panic! No one saw any signs of distress and rushed to save me. I was just paddling to the smell of hamburgers on the grill, is all. I'll go out in the morning and walk through the boathouse on my way to the end of the dock; I shall carve the date and my initials in an obscure corner of the doorjamb. I feel intense.
The lights in the night create a different music, devoid of words, unmotored and unfueled by human economy, winking at me in a harmonious eternity, singing me songs of my future: soon to be a teenager and skinny-dipping under the full moon, soon to warm cold skin with someone else's skin; soon to feel extraordinary.

I am glad I did not drown in words.

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pix:  http://heavens-walk.blogspot.com/