This is another blog serial. Ope.
My brothers reveled in each-other, thrilled to have their company. They did not intend to keep things from me but there were things only fish could know. I came down to the shore less and less,
unwilling as I was unable to be among their greatness.
Those days were spent quietly within shoulders of the mountain or upon the plateau of my father’s hands, if he would have me. In brief happinesses he would hold me to his chest and let me spill every word that came to my mind, without interruption, without judgement. Those were pleasant idylls, asides I knew to relish as they came and not take for granted. He knew the moonlight preferred
the grace of her fish to us, those who kept ourselves so openly into the day as we did her night.
As we did her anger.
I would get lost within the mountain and my father and I both would inhale it. Become high off it. He would carve me trails to stretching grottos. He would show me quiet respites beneath a canopy of trees. When he felt I needed it and he had no other choice, he would cocoon me within his precipices where the moonlight could not reach.
She would demand presence and he would deny her, but he could only do so for so long; my mother would call the tides, would pull the weight of the clouds, would suffocate us with a fog. I did not fault my father in these times for the fog would bring all on the mountain cold as death.
Or she would abandon us and leave the solar rays to do with us what they would, as long as it pleased her. Then the coolness of her
wake was wanted like a thirst, my father and I both blind to the other and only seeing her.
And so it went. My mother and her fish would often go on their own adventures, content to leave me to the rocks. To know that we could not follow. The loneliness crept in, thick and black. My strong mountain would only be without her so long before he too fell silent to me.
I knew resent then, in those moments. Angry to have been given a companion only to have him given another. Angry to be lonely with company.
Again I found myself plotting against those more beautiful than I, more accessible than I. I would find heavy stones that I hoped to pin them beneath the waves with, so that my mother could not reach them. Perhaps she would grow weary from reaching down so far, perhaps she would then see me nearby and know me again.
But I loved the fish. I could no sooner stone them than I could pluck myself and throw myself upon the surface of the sea.
This story, which I am breaking into an online serial to release every-other Saturday, is the original incarnation of my recently published poetry books My Mother, the Moonbeam and My Father, the Mountain. Posts related to each of those books are also included in this blog, offering additional information and insight to the poems. You can find more information on books, events, and the blog at http://www.faunalewiswrites.com
Fauna Lewis Writes 