The wind howls at me.
I howl back.
We are standing at the edge of the stone jetty. Stormy seas rage in front of us. The wind's in our face, hair, teeth. The ocean is full of rain, he says. Five-year-olds. They can turn a simple fact into something like a poem. The rain falls from the sky. It returns to the sea. It evaporates and is lifted to the sky. The winds blow in from the sea, across the beaches, through the valleys, over the mountains and deserts and plains, and back to the sea. The air cools, warms, is inhaled, exhaled, breathed, rebreathed. My howl is a note in a chorus of howls. A sound wave dissipates, but doesn't disappear. A tree in the forest falls and no one is there to hear it. But everyone does. The storm passes on and rains somewhere else, and that water ends up in a cistern, and then a still, and then a bottle, and eventually in the sweating glass on my desk. I take a sip. The vodka is viscous like the ocean in winter. I swirl it around in the glass and watch miniature waves crest and break on the sides, like waves against a granite jetty. It's comforting. Nothing ever ends.
