The weak tea of winter sunlight doesn’t quite cut
the cold as I stand before the sea. Beside me,
a long-gone pier’s pillars are mossy teeth
in an ancient mouth, roots now exposed
in a too-much- gum-low-tide-smile
much like my own. Like my mother’s.
Anemones pucker. I wade
into the ebbing tide to sit
neck-deep among seaweed —
a slick and briny prayer. The cold is my keeper.
My mother says she spent half
her childhood wishing she was a seal.
I am becoming her child at last. A wayward
daughter who looks so much like her mother,
this keeping hurts.
I could never not become her: knobbled knuckles, coarse
Norse hair, mascara that never stays put. A longing
for so much love that no one would need to drown anymore.
Before me, Harbor Seal bobs up, her conversational and ink blot
eyes like the mother of a god. I startle & stand,
waist-deep, aware of my aloneness so far from shore,
and back away, frightened and laughing and bowing
all at once. Each stone beneath me becomes a rosary bead
as I partake in the sacrament of daughterhood I have refused
all this silky life.
—
Hannah Martin is a poet, former naturalist, and cold-water enthusiast living by the Salish Sea.
