How I Know We Come From Oceans
When I was small
I sucked my thumb for salt.
Long before any wave
had reached for me, my blood
turned tidal, smelled of marsh
and mudflat, of pickleweed
and rusty algae. Once, surf
tumbled me inside out, a current
refused to let me go. Now I never
turn my back on swells.
When I take my shoes off, I always find
some sand between my toes:
As if my socks are woven from dunes.
As if my feet would be webbed.
My dreams wade beyond the sea-wall.
Sleepless nights miles from an ocean,
I hear roaring in my ears.
My blood is that eager to swim.
* * * * *
You Have to Swallow the World
“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world”
—Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
But the world is hard, weighted
by concrete, sharp with bayonets
and belfries, in each bite, shards.
The world is salted with exhaust
and exhaustion. You’d need gallons
just to wash down the mountains
of paper, dry with scribbling.
As for tribes and tribulations,
hypodermics and hypocrisies,
altercations and assassinations,
imagine all that swallowing.
Say you begin with some sweet bit,
that first grin-like lift at the corner
of a newborn’s mouth? After
you move on from amuse-bouche
to beggar’s bowl, spent cartridges
wedge themselves in your throat
like chicken bones.
When you get to refugees,
their parched treks and doomed rafts,
you’re moistening each mouthful
with generations of tears.
That’s before you face the oceans
sick with plastic, and retreat
to your own familiar table, fork on the left,
dull knife on the right. By the time you sit
to the everyday supper you’ve cooked
or have been served by fate,
you’re already heavy — knowing
you would need the appetite
of Zeus or the belly of a Buddha doll
to understand just one human life,
beginning with your own.