Slack

I.

There is an hour when the water decides nothing. Slack, the charts call it, as if it were rope gone loose in a hand, and that is close, but rope implies someone holding. Nobody holds this. It simply stops being one thing before it is the other.

The boats sit down into their own reflections. A heron stands in the channel like a decision nobody has made yet.

II.

My grandmother filled her bucket in any weather but she would not work the slack. Bad luck, she said, which I understood later to mean: pointless. Nothing moves, nothing is uncovered, nothing given up. You cannot read a page that isn't turning.

So we sat on the wall with the thermos and she said nothing about the light, which was, again, doing its September thing, and I learned that waiting is a job you can do badly.

III.

I have come to prefer this hour. Not the ebb with its revelations, not the flood with its forgiving. Just the pause that admits nothing is owed yet, the flats holding their breath, the bucket empty at my feet and honest about it.

Then somewhere under all that stillness the whole weight of the Atlantic turns over and starts, very slowly, coming back.