An Ocean

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An Ocean

for Sonya

Remember it: The way you stand. All eight

years of your child body stacked on the rickety 

gray frame leading up to your bunk. 

How, outside the window, evening washes

over ignorant dolphins. How, inside, we stand

just above a rolling fog of inevitable distance. 

Your cheeks are all salty when you say to me, again, 

but Mom! All mothers love their children, so if  I was never 

born, you would love another kid just as much. 

This charged, dangly bell shaped hypothesis floats to me and zaps.  

The question on this mouth-arm: Are we not just two 

separate and strange vessels? Your eyes look so much 

like your father’s when they are weighed down with life’s limits. 

Remember it: What it is in my voice as I say yes 

that makes you look up and 

hold my gaze it could never 

be this. My mouth is the holdfast, my words, the medulla.

By some miracle, the seahorses born within you pick up speed.

I can see them swim in circles around the warm rings of your steady gaze. 

The kelp blades in my eyes begin to move with currents of salted water 

until we find ourselves arms to arms, hands to backs, 

my shoulder, your cheek–all drifting in the steady

tides that flow between us.


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