(One more for the road, and still no seagulls!) The tide also ebbs, this gray slack dawn taking me to O’Hare, to the blue line, the Magnificent Mile– and yet already, a distinct impression of lack. Although Lake Michigan is tremendous under storm clouds— afloat or from dry land, it drowns out the shoreline, the day, and necessitates a more pioneering way, dead reckoning, finding the wind and marrying one’s course to it, HOLD FAST— […]
(waves, no seagulls) An undertow is a steady offshore-directed second-order flow, i.e. it is proportional to the wave height squared. Meaning: No wave can arrive completely without also leaving. It will always contain some percentage of its own opposition, no matter how it tries to keep it down. You are a physicist, and so of all people should understand compensation, that a wave’s nature is intrinsically antagonistic, and that any assumption of linear behavior, at […]
(The ocean poem is dead. Long live the ocean poem!) Oh what havoc a hurricane can wreck, loosing stairs from houses, houses from stairs, lifting and carrying away years of construction to some arbitrary location and then burying all the roads. Of course, the map is not the territory, and this is not a poem about the ocean, it’s just, this time I am certain as a storm surge, and so also irrevocable— it’s like […]
(continuing on with the ocean poems in response to this business–) You tell me about Oaxaca. I tell you about the Gulf, and then we talk about how we both almost moved to Hawaii, once. Maybe we would have met there, too, you say, as we survey the skyline’s tines from out across the bay. It’s strange, how language tries to make distinctions between bodies of saltwater– they all commute, or aren’t we proof? […]
OPTIONAL POETRY 