*Long From Her Garden

         She is never firm, my lover. She is often violent, and equally so when calm, but when she is all I can see in any direction, I am humbled by her magnificence. I become insignificant before her enormity. She does not love me, but is jealous of me nonetheless. She will never let me go, but I do not care. She is the most beautiful place I know, and I have been away too long.
         I met her years ago, when I was but a child. Gibraltar rose up from her like a shard of age-old bone. I heard her whisper as she washed my feet and swamped the ruins of the last Great War that marched, forgotten, down the Spanish coast. Ocean is what my father called her, and I felt enthralled as though under the spell of a siren's song. She was wet and warm, and bitter to taste-- a wonder and no small mystery to an even smaller boy. As a child of the military, and a camp follower perforce, our paths converged and drew apart many times. From Libya to the Azores, with their black volcanic sands, to the pebbled inlets of Massachusetts, and the white baking strands of Florida, we were never parted for very long. Each time I came to her, I heard her voice, but she never spoke my name. I would not have understood, so she held it in wait for the day I might return, a child on the cusp of manhood. And on the day I came to her at last, I felt her smile in my heart. She made me welcome and bade me learn of her.
         She revealed herself to me in subtle ways. On the deck of my first vessel I saw for the first time what sailors of old feared most-- the loss of terra firma over the edge of the world-- "Here there be monsters," the ancient maps declare of those seas uncharted --and I felt my throat close and my chest constrict. She was rarely the mirror I had envisioned; she was chaos, an unchanging constant ever in motion. Men-of-war rose and fell upon her every sighing swell, only seeking the refuge of her depths when she grew to rage. Porpoise mothers pushed their newborns to her foaming boundary to take their first breath and catch a glimpse of golden sun. Stars intaglioed across the night sky made their circuit to morning, so bright beneath a new moon I could read by their light. I grew to love her, but being a child of the shore, our paths diverged once more.
         It has been nineteen years since I left the sea-- Ocean, as my father named her --but I have carried her voice with me. I have heard her sing and heard her song chorused in the cry of gulls wheeling in the sky. It haunts me to this day. She learned my name years ago and has not forgotten it, calling me by name, often whispering to me as I sleep, sighing, "Return to me, you have been away too long."
         "Can I trust you?" I ask.
         "Never. I am fickle and easily angered."
         "Will you hurt me?"
         "If I can."
         "Why then should I return?" I ask.
         "Because you are mine and I have written my name in your heart. I am Scylla and Charybdes. I am Tsunami and Leviathan. I will destroy you if I can, but I will give you something the shore cannot."
         "What?" I ask.
         "Longing."
         And I have longed for her ever since. I have been too long from her garden. I know she is violence, yet I am drawn to her. Though she be calm above, yet am I turmoil within, without her. She is my lover, and I hers. She longs for me to lay furrows across her back with any ship I can find, and looking back, watch her smooth my wake without enmity. She smiles to know I long for her, to ride her swells, to feel her breath on my face and taste the salt of her tears. I awake each morning with that longing, wondering if our paths again will converge. But she is patient, if not always forgiving; she knows my heart is not my own, and that all things return to her in time.


E.L. Ashley
November 2700
Final Revision:
041401.021245.1