SEA-WATCHING
I love you like I want to lick your shoreline,
but what good has trying to describe the ocean
ever done anyone? Here is the trouble
with trying to talk about an object: most things
aren’t really about themselves at all,
they’re about the things you’re thinking about
on the day when you happen to look at them
a little too hard, no amount
of bone-white, salt-bleached wood,
twisting to indicate that it used
to be the roots beneath the tree;
used to twine through the dark
and the damp seeking water
and the richness that comes
from heavy pockets of decay
will touch the worry of the water-line—
rising, always, swallowing ground
once inhabited, an ocean, these days,
makes refugees, it warms, it creeps,
and I love it like I want to fall
out of an airplane about it, want to cry
with tenderness for those depths unmapped
but already shifting, pushed by human hands,
love it like I want to trip down the stairs
about it, stub my toe and chip my tooth
about it, love it like a teenager who thinks
the world they know is the world which will exist
as they grow, thinks that they know
the world even as it unmakes itself, I love
those waves like I love the ache of it,
which is lucky since the ache might be
the only thing left.
Sidney Dritz is currently reevaluating what to do with the rest of her life, which makes the angle to take in bios tricky. She finished her three-college tour of America at the University of Southern Maine. Her poetry has appeared in Glass Poetry Press’s #PoetsResist series, in Claw & Blossom, and in Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters, and she’ll be writing the upcoming column Stream Queens on @dailydrunkmag. Twitter: @sidneydritz.