The empty morning comes
to the vacuum of darkness,
the hollowed sky low over Apalachicola Bay.
Morning coffee cools in my cup.
Your funeral brought only the ritual
of closure, a process as natural
as a glowing ring circling the moon,
prophesying rain. No sound from the sea
this morning, the gray water a pane of glass—
only a fisherman on the slate smoothness,
cast net ballooned above his
head like a cloud of black smoke.
You and I, father, walked in the bay,
feet sliding on the sand, bumping stingrays
as your cast net soared, its black unfurling
casting a shadow of us in a black circle.
But I trusted you like Peter to the Jesus,
stepping surely on the waves beneath.
Years from now, I will awake
in another place, taste the day,
and wish for visions and dreams of you.
Surely, I’ll see the fisherman instead,
your face lost in a colorless past
that I arrange and choose, making
of you the person I wanted you to be.
As now, I will interpret the moment
as significant because of what it lacks.
I could chisel this moment in my mind,
shape significance in the morning mist.
I could come to your grave once a year
and kneel, listening for a spectral voice
to whisper in my ear the secrets
of life and death, the language of the sea.
The day you left, I walked by the bay
and found a bloated dead alligator,
tailless and rotting green in the sand,
milky eyes reflecting only clouds,
the gray that spread out over the whole sky.
Exegesis
A native of the Florida Gulf Coast, JEFF NEWBERRY is the author of Brackish (Aldrich Press, 2012) and A Visible Sign (Finishing Line 2008). He is the co-editor (with Brent House) of The Gulf Stream: Poems of the Gulf Coast (Snake Nation Press, forthcoming). Newberry’s writing has appeared in a variety of print and online journals, including Anti-, The Florida Review, The Cortland Review, Chattahoochee Review, New South, Memorious, Hobble Creek Review, Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art, Sweet: A Literary Confection and Waccamaw: A Journal of Contemporary Literature, as well as in the online anthology Best of the Net 2008.