” I like to look at your face,” he said. The words came from him suddenly, like a Sea Island thunderstorm that forms immediately from the ether. In the Sea Islands you can expect to be surprised.
The couple had been standing at the edge of the salt marsh, doing nothing in particular. The tide was in, the moon was full, casting its silver light upon the swaying grasses. The gentle lapping could be heard against the earth. The breeze was both warm and cooling–one of those “Island” things.
To a medical professional the lips are nothing more than muscle and membrane. But to an artist, a poet, they are much more. And he’d been watching her lips in silence for quite some time, despite the enveloping perfection of the night. He admired how they curved, how they made themselves evident, how when she smiled they curled at the corners. And he looked at her lips for reasons he could not explain.
The perfection of the moonlit night; the two of them under a palmetto, she leaning and he standing close; the sounds of the marsh encircling them–it was all just too great. So he finally turned to her as the moonlight glazed her form with elegance, making her a dreamlike sculpture. “I like to look at your face,” he said. And then was silent again.