Infant and InnocentFinn Niehoff
A honey bee fell into where I was painting today.
I plucked it from the thick white by its wings, gently, gently,
and left it on the driveway.
Watched as it crawled over the gravel, still drowning and slow.
I wonder if it had known.

I thought it better to put it out of its misery before the paint dried hard and plastic.
Crushed it as kindly as I could under my boot,
asked myself is this mercy?

And this morning, I saved a mouse.
Bundled it in hand towels and laid it in the sun
until it was dry and moving and afraid of me again.
It felt so nice then, that I had helped. Saved something.

I guess it really is all just balance. A give and a take. A borrowing and the return.

I’ve been thinking again about leaving,

about how best to take away the hurt.

I’ve been remembering what I’ve known and what’s stopped me for years,

and that is that you can’t.

And I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time.
I think it’s made something in me that will live and ache
until I see it again.

The water meets the land differently here, than it does in the east.
It’s stronger and colder and maybe a little angry.
It’s carved from the land staggering cliffs
and these coarse, desolate rocks,
dressed in moss and run through with cavernous hollows and tide pools,
filled by anemones and starfish.

I met the rush of the waves as they broke against the shore,
allowed myself soaked, just to get a little closer to it all.
I leaned into the wind with my arms open,
closed my eyes and pretended I was being held.

It was freezing in a way that had my face flushed,
and the tide was a churning and hungry thing,
and I sliced my hand on some barnacles, bled into the ocean.

A reminder that I am something real and breathing,
something fragile and borrowed.

The mouse I pulled from the water this morning will die, eventually,
and I will too.
The ocean will swallow up the rocks and the shore,
eat itself into nothing, eventually,
and I will too.
A return to the earth.
And I ask myself, is this mercy?
I think, often, that it might be.
And I ask, again, how best to take away the hurt?
I remember that you can’t.