Your Postcard Said
Poetry
The Sea Through the Eyes of a Child
It is the outermost house of my dreams
where I wrote my letter to a mourning dove honing
a song in the rafters. The sea is a place of sudden change, but it remains
the sea I write about. Life seems finite facing it, and the childlike pace of knowing
so little by its grace and fable is the mooring of our hours rising
or falling in the tide. Yet no one is saved. No one thing left to fault. There is
no warning that growing older,
your absence would mean more
than your presence. Though without absence,
there is no meaning to finally, at last,
or yet. There is only the pitch
of the floating floor. The cant of a window
breaking the rain in a vague vision of an inclemency
near past. There is a reason to be concerned about losing
one thing to find another, I think. Some memories
will always flee the eaves to clear their wings. Sometimes
because we cannot leave on our own, the weather
becomes an address of departure. From the outermost
place I can imagine, I label this errant
homing of dreams and begin again
by writing to you- do you remember?
Our house once stood on a sandy spit
until the sudden storm when the waves
claimed it, at last, my dear one
from the night of our dreams past,
from the dove
in the rafters above
the never-ending sea.
