Displacement

That summer, it was like snow. We stood on bilgewater-soaked herring nets and watched the wrinkled lava slump into the sea across the harbor. Black clouds rose from the mountain, the accretion of a thousand molten pours, and transmuted into luminous shapes we believed keen and conscious. The ash fell on our heads, on our sun-blocked skin, on dusted cars and rusted boats, the sand, the pier, and we were enchanted. We smelled liquid earth and brine. Fish and beach. On very quiet nights we imagined we heard the hiss of lava-touched water, the accession of two states, and it was good. We hardly moved in our sleep, next to each other. It was like listening to a soul and knowing where it had its source.

For breakfast, we made two cheese omelets and watched the volcano. We stood by the window with our omelets on our plates, and watched the insurrection of inner- with outer-nature. Our faces rambled in the proud brightness of the sun. The volcano was young and old. The volcano’s smoke was wild. Wind-stoked, it rose up. The volcano told us what we were.

In the dimness of dusk, the smoke loomed and the earth trembled, and then it was still. Night birds trilled. Interiors of lampshades were powdered with the wild gestures of moths shaped like leaves. Our eyes were exhausted. From inside the apartment, we tried to look around in the dark, to let it expand and become pure, to return us to dawn with restored vision, to the volcano. To the ash-dappled landscape and animals looking both ways at once. How they looked about them told us they’d known the mysteries of the nature of the volcano in darkness.

In the afternoon, we descended to the harbor. Dogs barked and barked. Wind coaxed a plait of smoke in our direction. We watched it unravel above the water in wonder until it disappeared without any shame. It never reached us. The wind turned cold and we shivered back to our apartment, where the landlord ushered a woman bent over a cane from one room into the next. She stood before the window and watched the volcano without expression. Her whole body watched. The spirit rose from the volcano and burned.

Understand that some are lost forever, you might have whispered. I hadn’t considered all the possibilities; bit-by-bit they revealed themselves. The woman, she turned around. She sat at the kitchen table and the landlord pushed a caked plate away from her into the center. We were unsure. We weren’t supposed to be there. To begin to know the countenance of the one that signed the lease.