May 9

Got a job today, down at Coal Point on the Spit, the fish processing/flash freezing/shipping/gift store that deals most directly with charter skippers & their clients, adjacent the harbor, its docks stretched like taut fingers over the greening water. Owned by a family renowned now for its two sons operating a crabbing boat called the Time Bandit on “World’s Deadliest Catch.” My compeers. I begin Monday & will be cross-trained in clerical, office & fish processing duties. Rubber boots are the only requirement. In the meantime, a beautiful Saturday & the usual saturnine heart trying to sing through it. Leaden weight. Off shortly for a new hike, past the bluff, towards the old Russian village, bear spray in tow, to see if that rich communion can ferry me from myself, from this sustained & thrumming chord strummed what seems already so long ago. & yet I hear it, waxing & waning, returning to me crystalline & clear, then taking wing to become some other birdcall buried in a dell, then again piercing in its cutting return to ache in me & ache in me. & so. I walk an anchor in me & a sliver of severed twine. I have left no wake. Here, as I am, to myself displayed, displaced, a quiet kind of living, un-intoned of grandeur, bereft time being of surge & swell. That I pattern footstep & echo footfall, even in a thick & viscous mud that swallows under in a rain, even in a patted sand that wave subsumes, even on a trod blade of grass that windblown springs again erect. I have been, promise to myself. & promise I will be.

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