The Sea Calls Me Back

The Sea Calls Me Back

The sea is a mouth.
It opens.
It takes the light whole.

I hear it at night,
its long black breathing
under the walls of sleep,
a pulse older than blood,
older than grief.

Land is a place of mirrors.
Faces slide over me
like oil.
Words clot in the throat.
Kindness comes thin as paper,
tears at a touch.

I am tired of being seen
and not seen.

The sea does not pretend.
It hurls itself at rock,
again and again,
a white fury,
a body that cannot lie.

I want that violence again.
I want the wind’s teeth
in my lungs,
the cold hammering the heart
into one hard beat.

Out there
there is no forgetting.
There no lies.
No turning away.
The storm looks straight at you
with its blind, enormous eye.

I would stand in it
until the skin split,
until the mind went quiet
as a stone on the seabed.

And then..
then I would know myself again:

A small dark shape
in a great dark water,
stripped of names,
stripped of longing,
only a breathing thing
held in the vast,
indifferent hand of the sea.