Poetry Monday: Waves

Song

What if it's really waves, only waves
making their restless peace on the broken shore,
the lull between them like a held breath
before it's blown into air as music.
Haven't I always missed the ocean, the way its salt
buoyed me up inside the wet, the air above warmer than the water below,
the liquid line between breathing and not, so innocent, so permeable.
Floating there, over the deep, untouchable bottom, out past the line
the waves made as they curl to hurl themselves on the sand,
I could be far from the rinky-dink, the hullabaloo, far even
from the headlongingness of water rushing forward
and sloshing back, like desire,
going nowhere.
Over and over the waves break on the gleaming sand
while a gull diving in and out
of the perfect again and again
draws a thread between the air and the water
sewing together their beautiful blues
as if to mend the wounds of the world.

--Barbara Ras

From her collection One Hidden Stuff.  Her more recent book is The Last Skin.  Barbara and I were email buddies for awhile earlier in the century, when she was republishing Paul Shepard's books at the University of Georgia Press, and later when she directed the Trinity University Press in San Antonio.  Among her many honors as a poet was the Walt Whitman Award in 1997.  The Mass. Review has a nice interview with her from 2017, in which she names the ocean as a major source of inspiration.