Here is the farmer, turning and turning in the fields near the sea. Here is his empty house on the cliff, and the birds calling at night. Once the farmer believed in a separate god, a god who contained the sea with doors, but now he walks, without company, under a solitude of stars. To swim in those white waves, he thinks, but he is no diver descending through air. He is a farmer of dry earth, and the blessing of water is away.

She sleeps each night in her boat on the sea, and rows toward a distant cliff each day. Once a man said Dawn to her there, night a distance to travel. A bottle might contain her words, she dreams, and those words might be a field after rain, or the surface of flesh over bone, or a tongue. When she wakes at dawn, she presses her empty hands together, remembering.

Somewhere upon the sea, the farmer believes, a small boat rides. Look closer, for in that boat the body of a woman turns, alone, muttering into a bottle from the chamber of sleep.

Rowing in light, she imagines insects descending over those fields near the sea. Summer hums and churns the dangerous air, each kernel of the ripening corn a farewell. She still sees the hands of the man who held her there, the creases of dirt and halos of nails. In the stalks, where their bodies once mingled, pollen-drunk bees drone.

What else is a body, the farmer once wrote her, if not a figure of desire? Now he imagines, in a prayer, the curved scar on her left thigh, and the way his tongue slid down the ladder of her spine, and the unfolding of her body in joy. Each day he reads, in her absence, an unanswerable sentence composed of sea and sky and the punctuation of birds.

Here is the only world, she whispers, the lone mast a mark written against the given sky. She yearns to tell him how the arc of sea birds is the end of a story she once knew, how the lap of waves is the murmuring of a voice after love, how the night makes a consolation of stars. Each morning she rows toward his waiting figure, the hum of oars a slow song in her hands.

There, on the sea, held aloft, the cuneiform of a mast appears. Consider the farmer, his mouth open with sound, amazed on this earth by such return. Imagine the birds wheeling above her distant boat, and the light between. Now, in time, let the farmer leap with his body from the cliff, descending below the earth and the house and the unmade bed within. Let him leave the bees of the fields behind. He has become, in the abandon of his fall, an offering.