“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it’s always our self we find in the sea.”

A poem on ships and growing older and growing beyond.

The body, a boat.
My skin a canvas, stretched
over the masts,
lax against wind,
rippling, cracking, billowing,
reaching after each new cold breath
exhaling across my neck
as it passes.

Fingers curl around ghost ships
but still hold on.
Anything to escape this heat.
This summer oceaning
over brittle grass,
the monsoon season
we forgot existed.
Winters like those make you forget
a lot of things.

Like the color of the waves
fogged by ice.
The worn hulls of ships
who won’t cross these depths again.
The winds change
every second
and the ocean, a universe
ever expanding,
but it doesn’t quite ease the ache
of losing your footing.

Knees scrape the deck
and paint wood with blood
we don’t scrub off.
Hair joins clouds.
Navigate by the freckles,
new,
when we burn the maps.

It is how we will find
what we are looking for.

—

Written tonight at 12:32 am, just a little too late to call it a birthday poem, but it certainly goes with the new year mood.

I am twenty-one today/yesterday, though I certainly don’t feel it. But I didn’t feel sixteen, or eighteen, so it fits the pattern of skirting the momentous. Being ageless in a way that rings unsteady and unmoored. So the ship metaphors emerged and I just ran with them. Swam with them?

I feel strange. Like I’m on the edge of something, but I can’t see the terrain under my feet, so I don’t know if the abyss is ahead of me or behind me, if I have to fall backwards like a diver, or forwards, hands outstretched, and if the choices will lead me to the same water or if the change of perception will make all the difference. Backwards, looking at what was lost, not knowing what to think of it –or how to see anything else– but at least not running away from it. Forwards, salt in your nose, hands outstretched for whatever waits in the dark to grab hold of, the bigger monster looming just over your shoulder, scenting the water.

I am grateful for this summer of rest, to not have to decide how to dive quite yet, but I am still itching to get moving, still craving to be underwater. I love working and creating, and there is nothing worse than reaching for the words and finding sand. But sometimes you don’t choose to take a break; the break chooses you.

I wonder, sometimes, if Ocean Growing took all the oceans with it. But that’s another post.

Maybe I just need to find a beach. “For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it’s always our self we find in the sea.” It is high time I figure out which self I’ll find.

xx,
Meg.

Ocean Growing for sale on Amazon now.