Grandfather Sea

As a child, running carefree and swift over the white, scalding sand,
I felt its enchanting power for the primary time.
The potent spell of the sea was heavy upon me,
Distracting me from my burning soles,
And sharp fragments of mollusks,
Which tore strange runes upon the still-virgin skin of my infant feet.

The scent of a trillion small, decaying creatures,
Brewed in the endless ebb and flow of the brine,
Formed a heady, humid perfume in the wind of my youth.
Heading over endless eastern causeways, sand along the roads,
Eternal familial queries of destination,
Premonitory cracking of windows and the first draughts of mystic sea air.

Later, first loves and books, first fears and friends, and sand, always sand.
Budding joys of overcast beach days, and slick, dark jetties,
Of obsidian and moss and riots of purple mussels.
The fascination of sea glass and the quest for the perfect, sable scallop,
And then the smooth, curvilinear forms of blossoming sylphs,
Awakening my first stirrings with fragrances of tides and lotions.

Savoring the slow-burn afterglow of the master’s water deities and hybrids,
Making each journey a delicious feast of small fears and sounds and SMELLS.
Seeming so right, knowing my moods and loves from his distant past.
The fading, rickety beauty of ancient shore hotels, now as two, her and I,
Woodwork impregnated and compromised by the moist, salt air,
Pipes and basins aged, betrayed, eaten by the hungry appetite of saline.

We all of us carry this liquid magick within, in our blood and bones.
I will soon take her over the wide western sea, from her ancestral home to ours,
And then head eastward once again, as three, her and her and I,
To introduce the nestling to her tentacled, briny grandfather sea,
The one who stole my soul but gave me back the joy of endless waves,
And to watch my daughter suffer her sea change, into something rich, and strange.