Red Tide

When I was young, during deep summer, when the red tide came in, we used to drive out to Blackie’s Pasture near Strawberry Point, and head towards Tiburon, following the shoreline to catch the rare bioluminescent lightshow, where the small waves lapped in, ethereally lit from within. And a decade later, after the bars closed, we’d drive out to Goat Rock, under full moonlight, to scribe our names and lost fragments of poems that would never otherwise be written, our deep confessions in the sand. The ocean as our witness. Our writing glowed with an unearthly light produced by the dinoflagellates trapped on the shore, waiting for the next wave to take them back home.

4/17/20