My Favorite Poem
Lost in the sea’s unforgiving blue,
I seek you.
Before me,
the day unscrolls its naked scripture:
Sun, vision’s burning field,
Islands, faint presences crumbling in the distance,
Water, the fickle immensities life is made constant by.
And it strikes me
I love the sea
because it borders this suffering world and the next:
the soul, it is said,
travels in a boat
from a winding inland river,
homing clear-eyed toward the ocean –
which is the bottomless beyond.
And I know:
Here, upon this beach,
wash the crushed remains of what was once mortal:
bone and kelp,
driftwood and tentacle,
porous red coral –
keepsakes life leaves behind
before dissolving back to brine.
I am home here, then,
whom the world never loved,
and from its torn edges,
I can almost see it all end:
an onrushing tide,
a radiant sea-swell
sweeping away all appearance,
gentle eddies whittling the self
till it is no longer even sand.
I think of you
landlocked and lost
in another element –
your body.
The sea teaches me
Love is a wish
not for safety
but for destruction.
I am not ashamed to admit it:
I love you
the way water loves.
Which is to say
I wish the world were through with you,
so you could return to me
ravaged, upon this shore:
a shell held tight
inside my palm.
– Legend of the Seafoam by John Neil C. Garcia
