Monday, January 24, 2005 -- 8:26 PM

A Tale of the Ocean
The ocean rests on her bed of sand
and me beside her.

Her icy breath reaches my feet
just barely, and cools them
as we look up at the stars.

She talks to me in a whisper
telling me of her sorrows and rages.

She almost touched the stars once, she says.

She reached, reached, reached,
and nearly touched a star,
so nearly that she felt it's warmth.

But she fell down so long and so hard,
back, back, back, away into the cold
and as she fell she screamed in rage.

And in her rage she killed a man.

She smothered him and crushed him
and watched the bodiless funeral the next week,
whimpering in shame
she watched the widow curse her
still she couldn't bear to give up the corpse.

No amount of guilt can make her forget her failures.

Far away the stars will only smile and wink
in their sly and lazy siesta way,
pretending to ignore her
while taking a keen and secret intrest
in her failings.

One day she will reach the stars, she says,
and then it will be as if she had never killed the man,
or any of the others.