Capricorn

Through the end of an old Coke bottle he tracks the flight of a petrel, until it is tattered by sea-wind and another blurred mintage of the sun. Along the pier, he hears the men with their reels, with their currency of damp sand. His rod quivers – weighted not with fish, but with the names of storms: Harmattan, Vendavales – turbid winds running the vanguard of dangerous straits. He kicks at a pile of fishscales: galleon ballast, a hoard of ducats spilled from an old Dutch dogger. The men will soon chase him off, this raucous hero plundering brigs. But now the bottle is a horn into which he pours so much breath, and the air has a tone borrowed from a blowhole, from wind singing through a bridge's rusting struts. A crab sifts sandgrains for its hole; its claw, an old sea-brigand's hook, is paying out doubloons and threats. Ah, but you know – if you were to take this child's hand, if you were to keep his gaze in yours and wait for each circulation of his breath; if you were to watch the pirated scenes of daydreams play out through a windfall of glass – then you'd see the copper-coloured sun. You'd walk this beach a long time with your thoughts trading in weather and wind, the petrels keeping pace with the rackish lines of dreams sailing in with the clinker-built storms. The past and the present would not be depressions facing each other, nor would there be grains of sand abrading your fate... On the shore, a gull, dead from the night's storm. With his rod, the boy flings it up, the glove of a dueller he's just Zorroed with his sword... No, the world would not be a wave repeating its collapse, but whatever mintage of story a boy can find among fishscales, sand, and the common issuance of wind; a boy who knows nothing of the linkages between storms; nor of the men, yet, who log weather's quick decay onto gauges of abuse; who knows nothing about paying for that old voyage toward death.