When I was young, I fell in love with a man on the beach—
I fell back in love, I'd always been in love. I have always been in love, flooding the reeds, seeking the next vessel, the edges
of my reach—
Maybe it was before the beach. Certainly, I fell in love before I realized it had happened.

But on the beach, leaning against the boardwalk railing, love stood with me.
A lighting strike, a prism in focus, waves over the jetty stones.
We looked out over the mouth of the bay, leading into the true ocean, and where the water met the cloudy sky.
It seemed as though we could run right off the sand and onto the surface of the water.

I look back on those days with wonder—
Who was I then? The love I felt was real.
The moment I saw him,
approaching up the shore,
That was love arriving,
wasn't it?

I wrote poems back then, too. I imagined our moments together, the little intimacies of a life.
And we lived them, perhaps too well. Perhaps we were drowning from the very beginning.
I blamed myself. I wanted to devour him, to possess him, to hold forever what I saw on the beach in the strafing evening light.
I threw myself away in the pursuit, prostrate wet waves pleading for a happiness I thought I wanted.

Days darkened into nights, nights spent paralyzed, cornered by the rains.
The storms came and washed the beaches away.
Gales and torrents pulling the boardwalk planks out from our civilized shores.
"This too is immaterial. This too can be swept away in the tide.

What is must be destroyed
in pursuit of what might be",
if the siren song is strong enough.
If the truth of her call is too much to ignore.

So I finally let it all go.

I went to the woods, to the mountains, to the bookshelf and the lonely tower.
I commited to the alchemy of death and rebirth, a revenant riverbottom thing wading through the flood.
I put roots down and grew like kudzu through the green hills back towards the sea.
I thought I could be king of smaller skies but I remain an idolator on the altar of the horizon.

And on the beach, love still sat, waiting.
Waiting for me at the end of the subway line,
in the companionship of the tides, and the tight redness across my shoulders as the hours pass,
in the shout of the gull and the salt on my lips.
Love lay amid the shells of the shore, always more beautiful strewn and ocean-kissed than possessed and parched on my shelf at home.

The man I loved on the beach was me after all.
I was the thunder clap;
I am the rolling wave, the weaving marsh, the whirling tern.
The halos form around my footsteps in the wet sand, walking alone.