Ocean Blues by Rachel Hsu

We crack our wrists in sync like we’re the beats
of a live performance
Sometimes you’re the silence
in the pause
waiting for yourself to bloom lively to rhythm
Sometimes you’re the silence
at the end of the song, when it’s late
and audience footsteps are undulating a bit like puddles
and once-filtered words are coming out a bit mushy,
a bit scrambled like a mixed drink

I always wonder what you use to time yourself
because you bleed in and bleed out like ocean

Fish swimming in, sliding through
the dancing kelp in a soundtrack with no volume
The way you slip out of conversation like
calloused fingertips dragging across a keyboard
The way you stretch me like a guitar string
plucked and thrown pillows

If I’m the music, you’re the hand
and we make promises to the ears of the living
You promise me we’ll both make sound
so long as it’s me that you’re playing
I promise without words but it’s enough

I wonder if you’ve ever tried
to play a flute while underwater

In my mind, you inhale and thrust your lungs
into the body of a singer
The singer accepts this transaction as love
like form of currency and
zips her dress up while she coos your name
Then she blows bubbles and the bubbles
tell their friends about you too
and it goes like this until the body overflows
and the water spills onto hot dry land
and all the liquid and sound evaporates
gets sucked into a thirsty cloud
and so the whole ocean now is nothing except
the sound of your name in its mouth
as we dream to ourselves that
this catastrophe too must be music

In the silence, I wonder what’s on your mind
Calculations of shoelaces, flopping about
every time someone runs away from a problem
Circular suicide like a clock because you always knew
the Classics and the numbers
and you could always count
because you could always count
on me to play

I wonder if you could ever sing a lullaby
if you could write an anthem for nighttime
because the thought of you is like a song that
sends me to sleep but still wakes me up
as if you’re both the beginning and the end
as if you’re the silence before and after the music
as if you’re everything in the music and not
which would make you the equivalent of everything
which is to say
Do you think every song is in love with its writer?
Does every measure love its ending?
Does every ocean love its organs?

Somewhere, a seahorse holds up a glass of champagne
while jazz waves crash and fizzle into laughter
Somewhere, a lobster grabs a microphone and
shoots a crab in the head
with melody

Does every song end this way?
Because, I think, I do.