Fisherman’s Wife The sun cusps onto the Rodhópou peninsula, loses shape, sheds heat, slips beneath the edge of the sky to vanish beneath the lingering dwell of a day’s last moment. The moonlight fishers now leave, their tiny craft trailing wavelets in the water’s now-pale peach. They climb the wave crests beyond the jetty, glide, dip, head unerringly into the void of the horizon. A vast tumult of greatness and emptiness awaits men who turn to the sea. This evening as I watched them leave, the enormous mother of a waxing moon dragged the tide out of the harbour. A woman stood at the edge of the quay as the last of the boats passed. She waved. His wave returned. A gull teetered alone on the last edges of the day. Beyond the waveexchange, the fishing life loomed: the spectre of the women alone pushing the pram, the humdrums of the hearth, the broken grain on the stone, the leaden heat under the roof, the walls that need repair, the solemn-faced cafe men who don’t know how to comfort, the fear and grief in recurring husband-at-sea dreams. All in a wave. When he was not quite thirty and the sun and sea had not yet tanned him into old-hull umber, before he had begun to be tired of the daily trudge to boat, before he had become embittered by falling prices and dwindling catches, before he had grown obsessed with income, before those things, he would come swiftly back to her, fath-
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