Though I tip-toed, tender into Trinidad, my books of atheism sprinkling the beach with denouncements of a deity, I mocked the majesty of el mar, sunk the Lost Coast black glass and swept the sand swoosh willy-nilly 'neath my sunburned toes.
And the seal pup baked in the sand, deaf to the barks of its worried mothers up the coast, who yelped in absolvent what-to-do? screeches for the shortcuts of solving the tides, of timing the rise of the foamy shore and the receding, cursed by the moods of a moon they barely know exists, as their pups grill steamy on the beach for the odorous whimsy of Newfoundlands, the bloodlust of giant sea eagles and the endless curiosity of passing children caked in sunscreen, clutching cameras, snapping photos.
Every new visitor sought your viscera, knowing the now-routine beaching of your kind, and the marine laboratory up the dune would soon cordon off your corpse with yellow tape, with orange-capped cones, with cuidado signs to study you and know why you were resigned to some cosmic abandonment.
And I thought you a shiny, sea-salty rock upon first glance, glistened by the mists of mortified el mar, deigned to act as perch for dumpy tourists' haunches and upon whose mounds would be carved the initials of fairweather lovers and the finite dates of a delusional destiny.
But the stink of your death had not yet plumed. We all guffawed.
You were hours earlier barking in the surf, looking for pups of your own, or arfing for the partner to bequeath them unto you.
Were those sunset woofs of worried mothers I heard up the coast all for you? Or is the whole world now sentenced to bark at the midnight mischief of the moon, flecked and filleted by no more caustic moans but for the collective malice of an absentee maker?
When fogs roll in, our dear, slick, dead, desecrated, sloppy brother, again, to sleepy Trinidad, you float away and feed forever in my fables of the ruse. I wake to hear you barking again.
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