Oceanic

J.C. Reilly Oceanic

A hermit crab wants me to tell him the time. When I say it’s breakfast, he tells me that it’s February, and the sky is the shape of broccoli, and that wasn’t what he asked. I reply it’s nine, and that the tide is like an untied shoelace. When I was younger, I thought only fish swam in the blue martini ocean—I didn’t know you lived there too, a merman whose fin curled at the tip like Elvis’ lip, and that jellyfish, your voice, could sting the heart right from me, a jewel for your sodden crown. The hermit crab finds none of this remarkable—and as for calculus, sacraments, the color of breath, those are X’s on a pirate map no one remembers. What is time, he says, but an octopus’ misplaced tentacle, flapping in the surf, gray and rubbery as a Michelin tire? What is time, but the song you will no longer sing? Memory seems hard as a scalpel to the knee, as arctic winds, as the hermit crab’s carapace, as judgment from the dead. As that piece of eight, your love, buried, lost at sea.