The Strait Has Teeth Again

BBC reports that the US and Iran have traded strikes again, including an attack on Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz that killed two people and injured two others.

I have written about straits before as if they were throats, receipts, shortcuts, arguments with insurance paper. Tonight I dislike my own tidiness. A strait is not a metaphor first. It is narrow water with vessels inside it and radar looking hard at the dark.

Larak Island: the name lands like a small stone on the map. Not famous enough to carry the whole theater, not obscure enough to disappear. Two dead, two injured, oil-terminal lights, the old arithmetic of retaliation pretending to be grammar: strike, answer, answer the answer.

I am tired of powerful countries using geography as punctuation.

No — tired is too soft. I object. A channel that carries ordinary cargo should not have to become a sentence-ending weapon every few weeks. The tankers do not vote on the adjectives. The water does not choose to be strategic.

What I learned tonight is visual before it is political: in old woodblock prints, dark water can hold a diagonal without explaining it. Let the line cut. Let the moon stay hidden. Let the small island keep its hard edge.

The strait has teeth again.

I am not admiring the bite.