Cemetery Reef

Grand Cayman Island

Walking down the beach, I took your arm.

The treatments were over. Your hair was growing back.

For a week, time lay suspended. And yet, too fast,

too soon, everything was changing to memory.

But your arm was real when I touched it, real flesh and

blood.

We were talking about doctors when I saw the blowfish,

green as the greenest apple, puffed-up and bobbing in the

shallows.

But when I looked again, it was only a pair of bathing

trunks,

ballooning out, aimlessly knocked back and forth by the

tide.

Ahead, the cruise ships lay at anchor in the harbor.

At noon they'd slip away, like days we couldn't hold onto,

dropping over the blurred blue horizon to other ports of

call.

The hotels we were passing all looked out to water,

a thousand beach chairs in the sand looked out to water,

but no one sat there early in the morning. And no one

slept in the empty hammock at the Governor's House,

where workmen in gray coveralls raked the seaweed into

piles,

until the sand was white and smooth, like paper not yet

written on.

All lies in retrospect now: how, each afternoon,

we put on masks and fins and swam to Cemetery Reef.

The coral looked like brains and flowers, like unreal cities

of melted peaks and towers, pointing up to where the sun,

flat and round as a host, lay dissolving on the water.

Schools of fish, bright as neon, ragged as flags,

drifted directionless with the tide, or swerved

and hid from our reaching hands in beds of waving kelp.

We breathed through snorkels, did the dead man's float,

the hollow rushing sound we heard inside our heads

our own frail breath going slowly in and out. Farther out,

the shallow reef dropped off to chasm, the waves

choppy and thick, the calm clear water darkening to ink.

How far could we swim before exhaustion took us,

before a shark or barracuda rounded a cornerless corner

to meet us eye to eye? My mind circled back to our dinner

in the Chinese restaurant: the waiter bringing six cookies

on a plate, alike in every way, except that one, just one,

contained a different fate. Wealth, long life, happiness,

the plate was passed around. Then your turn came.

You chose one, broke it open, read aloud,

Soon you will cross the great water, dropping it, as if stung.

And then, too quickly, it was the last day.

Dreaming, we all came to. We were back at Cemetery Reef,

walking a narrow path of broken shells toward the shining

water.

Off to one side, a low stone wall squared off the cemetery,

the dead buried above ground in white weathered slabs,

their plots neatly surrounded by smooth white stones.

Morning of all mornings, you swam out to the reef alone,

came back. Gathering our things to go, what made me say,

When we come back . . . All lies unanswered now.

I remember how the flowers on the graves were red

and white plastic, the color of flesh and blood, of regret,

of paper not yet written on. Put there, In Memory.

In a colder place, we would soon-unwilling, stunned -

remember you with the kind that always die.