Talking idly to a friend about the weather, about how today Malaspina Strait is moving north, he asked me if there’d been a seismic event.

It took me a moment.

“Is the strait the physical landform or the water it contains?” I asked.

“Both,” he said.

Okay. The water in the strait is moving north. A southeast wind is blowing.

A few weeks earlier, I’d reread a poem of Pablo Neruda’s from Winter Garden. The Star is the final poem in the book, the manuscript of which was found on his desk after his death under suspicious circumstances just twelve days after Pinochet’s coup and Allende’s suicide.

Well, I never went back, I no longer suffer
from not going back, the sand willed it
and as part wave and part channel,
syllable of salt, leech of water,
I, sovereign, slave of the coast
surrendered, chained to my rock.
There is no freedom anymore for us
who are fragments of the mystery,
there is no way out for returning
to oneself, to the stone of oneself,
no other stars remain except the sea.

There’s much about this poem I don’t understand and much I can only guess at. Its grammar confuses me.  But the lines “part wave and part channel, syllable of salt” stood out when I first read it, and were then echoed in my friend’s observation.

Are we part wave and part channel? Both the body that contains the energy and the energy itself?

Of course.

The deeper question is, are we river or ocean?

In a creek or river, the water moves through the wave created by gravity and obstruction. The wave itself doesn’t move much.

In an ocean or lake, the wave is created by winds or tides. Its energy moves through the water, but leaves the water, momentarily lifted by the wave’s passage, behind.

Which are we?

In Autumn, the poem preceding The Star, Neruda writes of leaving the city in its turmoil and politics:

I fly back to the sea wrapped in the sky:
the silence between one wave and the next
creates a terrifying suspense:
life ebbs out, blood stops flowing
until the new wave crashes on
and we hear the booming voice of infinity.

And, of course, that’s a rich description of the heart pumping blood through our arteries – the stops and starts that, like the individual frames of a film winding through the projector, create the illusion of an uninterrupted flow. Endlessness. Infinity.

Until it stops, the end of the reel flapping in a dimmed movie theatre.

But we are more than a strip of tiny images stuttering in the dark, more than a heart beating out the time of our days. We are wind, we are gravity, we are the obstruction that creates the waves, we are the waves themselves. And for a few years our bodies are the vessels that contain it all.