LISA DOWLING

San Clemente

Why the map was blank in her mind
is a riddle, as she knew the sea by heart.
The rings sculpting the fathoms bent down
the continental shelf and faded out
like ripples in a pond, into nothingness.
The island sat like a secret offshore
for thirty years as she drove up and down
the strand looking for love, for luck, for the sea
to tell her what to do about pain. It greened
and grew, keeping dolphins and eels in
its cerulean chests while she went hungry,
searching for any bits of life to wash up whole.
Ships skirted its forbidden coves; seabirds
cried the coordinates to themselves.
It straddled the skyline, dark cliffs against
a reflected wall of air, and it waited as she
combed the coast for answers, for shards
of shattered glass polished to false treasure,
for shells unbroken by the weight of waves.
Two objects, immovable, distant, each
unaware of the other until one day the winds
lifted the veil of dust the desert sends high
over the ocean’s brow, and slit the sheer
molecules apart. With the seal cracked
between earth and sky, the island rose,
ambergris spit up from a whale’s belly, golden
hunk of possibility. For years she had been
sliding up and down the zipper of the shore,
train tracks, asphalt, shifting wind; her life
a fiction, much like the saint who was tied
to an anchor and thrown into the sea
for spreading impossible tales. It is said
the waters parted to let them fish his body
from the floor, and she sees how the sky
split open briefly to allow her in. As the key
sunk into mist, the sun pulled down its blinders
once more. But now she knows it’s there,
little mark on the map she overlooked her whole
life because she was too busy watching
the highway for hazards. That knowledge,
pinned to the edge of the horizon, sets her free.