The Sea

René Magritte

Collective Invention

The Sea

Stroke by

stroke my

body remembers that life and cries for

the lost parts of itself----

fins, gills

opening like flowers into

the flesh----my legs

want to lock and become

one muscle, I swear I know

just what the blue-gray scales

shingling

the rest of me would

feel like!

paradise! Sprawled

in that motherlap,

in that dreamhouse

of salt and exercise,

what a spillage of nostalgia pleads

from the very bones! how

they long to give up the long trek

inland, the brittle

beauty of understanding,

and dive,

and simply

become again a flaming body

of blind feeling

sleeking along

in the luminous roughage of the sea's body,

vanished

like victory inside that

insucking genesis, that

roaring flamboyance, that

perfect

beginning and

conclusion of our own.

~ Mary Oliver ~