- write4hire
After the Tide Went Still
Updated: Apr 16

After the Tide Went Still
For my friend Sheila Collie Spencer, 1963-2023
I thought I was done writing
about grief, grateful for this bountiful
warm spring in the Low Country, good
place to sink my feet in the pluff mud
of sorrow without sorrow sinking
me altogether, writing and biking
through salt marshes of bereavement
unbereaved, that all too familiar, unfamiliar
respite found writing into shadows
on sunny afternoons, pedaling under
swaying Spanish moss, a confusion
of salty sweat dripping off my brow,
ready to write something to make me
laugh at myself, my assumptions about,
well, everything, already taking notes
for a breezy piece about strangers saying
I look like Larry David, all my kids snickering
at that laughable blow to my vanity when
the spinning earth suddenly clanked to a halt,
the sun trapped behind a cloud, tide stilled,
car stalled crossing the trail, a toddler’s
ice cream cone tilting in the gaping suspension
of what we know we know until I heard
the rusted gears groaning, the world squealing
back into orbit, but I was already somewhere else,
gulls cawing, bright sun making me squint, ice cream
splattering on concrete, the little girl wailing, all
behind me as I drop the bike in the grass and sit
under a live oak, chest rising, chest falling, nothing
but alive in the knowledge that whatever anguish
comes this way, there is no comfort, no explanation,
no platitude worth its salt now burning my eyes.
—SL, Port Royal, SC/Hatteras Island, NC, April 2023