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from Diary of an Island's Skin
Ari Messer

 

Tide Tide Tide

The dark tide gathers along my beaches as driftwood in the old days when they made their vessels to scatter when things went awry. These days it’s just sink, and no one prays.

This is the tide of a thousand fish. There is not a lot of room for water. The other islands have their whisky and constellated crags and silk-screened t-shirts. The other islands have something to sell and they do, they make their living. I have my skin of fish—unlike fish skin, it is inconsistent and no good at what it does. It has no purpose or use, so perhaps it is rather mean and backward to state that it is no good at what it does, but it certainly could help me find a hat, a wide-brimmed hat of wicker or palm fronds to shelter my banana trees and sacred formations. It could certainly at least have the courtesy to do that.

When the tide of a thousand fish began, the sun was still hidden occasionally by fog, little masks of fog laughing agreeably at their audience of shade. The silence was deep and symphonic. Now it is July, the hottest month, and the mackerels and white-fin tuna which coat my volcanic scalp cake and dry up and then their paper skins litter my beaches. They toss about and rustle against the breeze.

I don't know who to talk to. I've never had skin problems before. Indeed, I never had a skin until the tide of a thousand fish draped one all over me. Such a dampening of sound; such a cluttered rhythm; such a dark tide, with an abnormal percentage of anchovies. But, yes, skin problems—the cracking that feels like my mother lava, only stuck outside of time now without transformation, without communities of silt and crust, of sparkling magma and the joy of hardening. I remember something about fish oil as a panacea, but see nothing but fish, not their oil, wherever that comes from.

It is okay to have a skin, but it seems more a barrier than anything else. I had never thought of what was inside me and what was outside me; had never thought there was much of a difference between the birds and comets and wind and mud and wet reeds. Can’t stop thinking about how to protect what’s inside my new skin, how to horde more creatures in my few caverns.

I don’t know who to talk to. There is no water in sight. There are other islands around—the old shrimpboat fisherwoman sings of them sometimes as she passes by—but they’ve always been just beyond my vision, I guess, and even if the old ocean were to cave in, the other islands to slide toward my fat belly, the horizon would still be so cluttered and flooded with ono and snapper and rainbow bass that I couldn’t see anything anyway.

I don’t know who to talk to. Whispering my name, the tide of a thousand fish forms a mouth which darkens and blends back into itself, like sunset or sunrise.