Marsha Foss
Sin Titulo (Untitled)
from the photographic series "Water Wastelands" by Señor Manuel Piña
A title gives no hint
to help understand the story
of a man diving off a concrete pier
somewhere in Cuba.
The stark photograph
captures him in swim trunks,
already wet before this dive.
Water slicks his muscular legs.
He has not removed his shoes --
perhaps headed to a place across the water
where he will have to run
on a stony shore.
Small waves, high clouds, no land in sight.
The black and white of the picture
do not reveal the color of the sea, the sky.
A man's naked back
glistening,
poised on the edge.
"and you murmured in your tents..."
Deuteronomy 1:27
Always they were murmuring during those 40 years,
dissatisfied by this thing or that which had gone wrong.
My tent pitched so securely in the solid earth of you, and I believing always in your faithfulness and strength were nearly destroyed.
So I stepped out of the stagnant air of the shelter we had built together and I stopped murmuring and I shouted instead to the wind.