A boat runs out of water
and marries sand,
its skin soft as sailors
dream it.
See a man walking
towards a woman
whose arms hang loosely
at her sides,
her dress red enough
to do the talking.
The man pauses
to pick up a shell,
its underbelly iridescent
in the early morning light—
sun not a lemon
but lemonade,
spilling the broken crockery of gulls.
This is the reunion
of two souls that have been meeting
for centuries,
the bodies they inhabit now
too old to live for lust,
too young to know anything better.
And so they speak
their earliest language.
In a moment
all will be memory:
a man crowning
the rightful owner of a shell,
a woman in a red dress
who is not the sea, and yet—
© Nicole Melanson
* This poem first appeared in New Delta Review