A Strange Goodbye
(rough draft)

Breath and bones, a tangle of sharp words, but you were really essence of water.
You, rising up with the sun, filled with light.
I couldn't see you that way when you were alive.
Was it always in you waiting to be revealed?

I didn't know you were the sea. I thought you were a man, stuck on this plane.
Just like me, a mass of opinions. We believed in things together.
We assumed we knew it all or at least enough to know
We weren't light dissolved.
It doesn't matter. Maybe you'd say, let it go.
"I'm not sea spray. I'm earth and clay. I'm your uncle, your DNA."

But does it matter that I see you in the sea spray now you've gone away?
We're sad, no place to hide the loss...well, the others have it, coat pockets,
children, extra rooms with doors. But I can't  find a way to tamp it down, the sense that all is wrong, somehow, lost.

I wander by the ocean. I wonder how you got here, how you changed into essence when once
You were a man. Life whittled you to your core. And now we're forced to let you go. You're almost gone.
If I didn't find you in the sea spray, I wouldn't know that death is not the end.