receding birdmad slipping away so this is permanent... 020107 ... een stom kind hair line 030318 ... ovenbird He wants to go out on the boat. It’s the middle of the night but he is determined to paddle to the island that is only exposed at low tide. He’s packing head lamps and granola bars and life jackets. I don’t want to go. I have a bad feeling. As I try to translate the feeling into words I have a vision. It arises forcefully in my mind, the premonition shaping itself into an arrowhead that tears through my skull and lodges itself in my amygdala. We’re in the boat on the ocean, approaching the island which is barely more than a sand bank. The water is calm but I can feel the depths of it below me: a mouth expelling water dredged from drowning lungs, a swirling sickness. Our boat is a coffin thrust from the earth and set adrift in a flood. Whales gather, singing a mourning song. We haul our boat onto the shore which is already being eaten by the rising tide. I can sense sharks in the water, their twisting flesh just an excuse for too many teeth. The darkness is a pillow pressed to my face and I can’t breathe. The vision ends with a wall of water approaching from the north, my death in the shape of a standing wave. “I don’t want to go,” I say as my glimpse of the future falls away. But he’s already closing the trunk of the car and I’m already in the passenger seat and we’re already on our way to the docks and he will see the island revealed by what recedes and I will drown in the sea of his insistence. 260116 what's it to you? who go blather from