Sanctuary

The tide pool crumples like a woman into the smallest version of herself, bleeding onto whatever touches her. The ocean, I mean, not a woman, filled with plastic lace, and closer to the vanishing point, something brown breaks the surface—human, maybe, a hand or foot or an island of trash—but no, it’s just a garden of kelp. A wild life. This is a prayer like the sea urchin is a prayer, like the sea star is a prayer, like the otter and cucumber— as if I know what prayer means. I call this the difficulty of the non-believer, or, put another way, waking, every morning, without a god. How to understand, then, what deserves rescue and what deserves to suffer. Who. Or should I say, what must be sheltered and what abandoned. Who. I might ask you to imagine a young girl, no older than ten but also no younger, on a field trip to a rescue. Can you see her? She is lead to the gates that separate the wounded sea lions from their home and the class. How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for herself: to claim her own barking voice, to revel in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers woven into the cyclone fence.