Thank you note in response to an invitation to the beach (reconstructed and reposted)

Dear J--,

On that windward coast, that afternoon, the god of poetry came barging into your room like a loud man in a loud shirt calling us to a loud party where he’d already had three beers. You slept beside me. Your skin touched my skin. You didn’t notice that either. I followed the loud man out the window into that sky. I had no word for that blue, but that was all right; I did not need a word. I was studying the conjuration of things: this blue inside the reef, that other blue outside the reef, the brown-ochre reef itself below the line of the whitecaps. The sea-blast rushed on to the shore, shaking the coconut leaves and the hibiscus bushes, losing itself in the scrub and never quite finding the village. It left salt in your room, there to touch and taste, a fine film, a crystalline grit, a light corrosion of metal, working quietly, secretly, as if I had asked in my prayers for love and faith and accidentally got salt instead.

Funny, after all that came after, this is what stays. I’ll call you.

Your friend,

K.