Monday, January 16, 2012

Waves



There's something endlessly restorative about the waves, wherever in the world they are.

Here's an ode to the sea, to celebrate—


Stroke by
stroke my
body remembers that life and cries for
the lost parts of itself—
fins, gills
opening like flowers into
the flesh—my legs
want to lock and become
one muscle, I swear I know
just what the blue-gray scales
shingling
the rest of me would
Feel like!
paradise!  Sprawle
in that motherlap,
in that dreamhouse
of salt and exercies,
what a spillage
of nostalgia pleads
from the very bones! How
they long to give up the long trek
inland, the brittle
beauty of understanding,
and dive,
and simply
become gain a flaming body
of blind feeling
sleeking along
in the luminous roughage of the sea’s body,
vanished
like victory inside that
Insucking genesis, that
roaring flamboyance, that
perfect
beginning and
conclusion of our own.

—Mary Oliver




image:  Breaking Wave, Asilomar State Beach, Tewy

No comments:

Post a Comment