There were the lines strung near the garden of the generations before and how the wind would fling and billow and crack the white sheets. At least one time, a lament at some bird's droppings just then, berry tinged and sun baked — the smear there ever after, faded, but obdurate. Those lines something like this framework for the yellowed and silvery nets, what you said resembled fog difficult to replicate. And so the pencil on the tempera, how I imagined her filling in the clouds on that one painting only I love. The painstaking work in a room with good light all to show movement, what the wind does with range. Sometimes, the anemometer resting and then, suddenly, spinning — its halved cups a blur that dizzied, that proved not all can be entirely seen. This rush of, this gust. How we would walk into it or with it at our back, claim it could lift us if we let it.

Not the sea, though it came from. Though that is what you spoke of — the water's power. How it thrashed and railed and sprang. The spume's white like blank canvas there in the background. But more the bone, the whale's rib. Heavier than a branch, that driftwood we dragged down to the line between the wet and the dry and sat on, looking out, our feet buried. Sturdier and sharper than. This one of a set that once sheltered a heavy heart and lungs that could hold thousands. Somewhere someone stands two on end and recalls birches or the sacred vault — the eye drawn up, arcing. But here it remains prone. Nestled in the brown grass with the deep green and swath of what resembles glacier. Age old. Of the sea now drying.