She beats the driftwood against her thigh during a break in the squall, with branches and burls culled from debris and dark conversation of wind, water and wood about her feet.
She shakes out sand and rubs the wood on her jeans to shine up the wet pores looking for a face, and finds it, fumbling with a worn-out burl, her snowy cheeks turned scarlet like twin fires on the beach of the morning.

She has discovered a fable to create for her children.

I look, see nothing, and I shall not forget that when she left me that morning the ducks and gulls and the sea turned from tone and sonority to rattle and racket, the caesura and pause of the sand transformed to an endless taut drum by the pounding of the surf.
I shall not forget how I could taste the cold metal my tongue had become without her melting syllables, how wet and warm from the rain at the river’s mouth I stood shoes hung about my shoulders, impoverished of myth, looking at the torment of the sky, the storm in my mouth gone quiet and dry.

-Jeff Burt, Treehouse

Tagged: Jeff Burt, Jeff Burt Faces, Jeff Burt poem, love poem, poetry, Treehouse literary magazine