Ocean.
by Jacob Edelstein
After Hai-Dang Phan
Ocean billowing out endlessly whipped and white-capped, lifted in wind. Ocean glinting and wet with orange sun. Ocean always too far off, too much an unbroken possibility. Ocean sucking at porous black rock, appearing over the crest of a hill, cold and sharp in the morning, vast beneath a cutting keel, endlessly opening and lapping at the spaces between our lives. Ocean moving around, through a pod of grey bodies; babies surfacing to slap the water with their muscular tails. Ocean rolling in round and heaving, smashing translucent, at speed, terrifying and tempting me. Ocean wailing in a nightmare, dreaming of rising to retake the land, swallow a rocky shore. I tried to stop it. Salted reflector of light and sky, bridge to more than any one want or fact, most infinite inverse of what all I know of life, tell me what I mean to you when I float. I am so tired, Ocean. Speaking of all I’ve already let slip, all your ways I’ve allowed to quiet and die while you continue to roar. Forgive me, us, flow through this brick-laden now to allow us all a then. Ocean, I’ve already chosen, and though I feel sick I know that this too is a story, might become clear. Give me morning gleaming, unbroken over your glass body. Find and carry me at dusk, allow me shelter, surety under your long and heavy breaking wing. Ocean holding disparateness together, liquid tether for the only world I know to expect. There is no other version, you say. It is a misperception of the nature of matter in time, a trick of the eye, to see doppelgängers making “the other” choices. All of this is you, me, a series of meetings with that which is stuck to the land, your lapping in the aftermath of eons at the taste of something wholly new. You carry away pieces of my edges; they sink and dissipate into your whole until I can no longer see them, sense them; until in their place I come to expect what new forms you have left behind. May I see that this is all one body shielded by the deep-drafting hull of a ship that carries heartbreak in a long-haul container of possibility. This is motion sickness, a storm, clouds and fog that push on me as I am borne over you, that block out the light. Roiling ocean I call Pacific, howl back at me, remind me I am needed nowhere but here by your side.
Yours truly out front during a late evening Cove session. Photo credit to my sister, Rae.