Homage to Wendy

Wendy Bishop was a writer who died in 2003 of a tumor wrapped around her heart. My friend Dean was her husband. He lives in Alligator Point now and protects sea turtles that come to the beach to lay eggs.

Dean and I walk the beach, talking of sea turtles, guitars, old friends.
“Tell me the name of those again,” I say, pointing to tiny clams that disappear bottoms up in the brown wet sand.
“Donax,” he says.
“That’s right,” I say. “I always think it’s gonads.”

Returning to the thin arm of sand, stretched before the low beach house, Dean sits on the towel while I wade into warm water, my joy meter ticking upwards as the waves canter toward me. And I dive into the murky Gulf, thick with salt and seaweed. Far across the water, the horizon stretches in a long flat line.

“It always changes,” Dean had said. And he’s right. It used to be you had to walk miles for the water to reach your shoulders. And now I’m just twenty or so yards out and it’s plenty deep enough. And yet it’s always the same, too, I think, laying my body on the surface as waves jostle and knead and tease me like a cat with a toy mouse.
Yes, God, this is why I came, for this, for this. And a voice in my head says, this would make a nice poem. Not my voice, of course. It is Wendy whispering, not wondering why I turn up – bad penny that I am. She never scolded me when she was here, just gave me that look sometimes that said, “simmer down.”
And now she exhorts me to clutch the seaweed, the long water grass, brushing my fingers, to breathe in the pungent, ancient scent, to stop simmering now, and live life at a full boil.