Elegy for Big Talbot State Park
Brendan Nurczyk
Elegy for Big Talbot State Park
by Brendan Nurczyk
"I’ll write on the stark singular// page at midnight, bright and limited// as a coast, I was here"
We’ll get there in time to watch
the heron empty its beak of fish
into the Nassau Sound, flurry of silver
bodies etching blue knives, these
wasted afternoons becoming lessons in
learning to love every part of the
branch the Spanish moss snags, our
soft dislodging of eyes and the stubbornness
of sand, and brine, the way the hot air
cuts into the cold. Waist deep in the water
and dancing hard on my sprained ankle,
I’ll point at a white abandoned shirt hanging
from a branch on the shoreline, dark
yellowed-in armpits, a calcified once-body,
and remark, It could be anyone’s, even ours.
And you’ll nod silently as the water swells
now at our shoulders and moves us farther
and our skin now more salt than human.
And when we’re back on the shore we’ll write
our secrets in the sand and then quickly
bury then. Let them die in the mouth, let
us swim for hours, idiot fish. And I’ll think of this
place, bruised into a childhood I measure
by hurricane seasons, by the perspiration that
builds on the windows of the house. The
messages I scrawl into the glass that warp
and evaporate, and there’s no proof
I was ever here besides this single moment
eaten apart by mosquitos and low sun
like the oranges we emptied of any flesh
with our sticky hesitant mouths.
I’ll tell you on the other side
of the shore, between here and
Amelia Island, in the pruned
topography of my hands. I’ll write to
you on the gullies of eroded dunes,
on every inch of available skin on
the body I bury under layers of clothes
and inside summers I waste with
nothing but the pumping of my lungs
to the rhythm of the wind adrift
cycads. I’ll write on the stark singular
page at midnight, bright and limited
as a coast, I was here,
you don’t have to believe me, but I was.
About the Writer...
Brendan Nurczyk is a poet and essayist from Jacksonville, FL. He is an alum of the Iowa Young Writers Workshop and reads for the Farside Review.
About the Artist...
Kaleigh Simmons is a student at Savannah Arts Academy. The mediums of their piece are Alcohol Marker and Color Pencils.