you are not what i want, thalasso
The shoreline rattles. Fist-sized rocks roll front to back,
like thousands of hands desperate to hang on every time
they’re dragged from the dry land. And so much red seaweed
has been thrust under the sun, melted between the stones,
that it has taken the consistency of burned flesh.
Yet ahead, more revulsions: the cracked bottom half
of a horseshoe crab, a seagull carcass with webbed leg still attached,
black skate cases long dried and stilled. You see?
I have reasons for my fear of this American ocean,
but I admit: even creeks and rivers have been suspect to me.
I have read too many stories with leeches and other creatures,
primed for pinching and destroying if I take the wrong step.
Huron, clean and known, you store thousands of my footprints
like fossils, and every summer, I burrow down my toes to recover.
But not this year, nor next, I fear, with the shutters drawn
between my countries, and so, thalasso, full of death and unforgiving:
you are all the water I have, so you can crash up my calves
and loop an arm around my waist like a slithering corset,
but I will not squeeze my eyes shut
and I dare your undertow to try and take me.
And as I taste the salt-strings of my hair I’ll sing grace, grace,
because there is more color in the ocean than I’d known:
silver salt clouds, golden funnel-billows,
mint in the crest, violet in the stones,
and yellow ochre that sways like forsythia along the seabed,
and I am tempted to lose my edges just as they do
with every current that passes, with every bone that’s gone cold
and longs to be buried.