prurient, watching sex
between bat rays,
their paired wings stirring water.
Oblivious
to anything but each other,
they float joined
from the harbor’s sand bed to its surface
with a grace
Fonteyn and Baryshnikov would envy.
How can I not project
pure liquid pleasure on them—
their rising and rolling, gentle thrash,
the long, slow synchronous glide?
How can I not imagine tenderness
when they spread their wings like birds
coasting on a thermal
and swirl their own currents?
Until done, or alerted
by our canoe—
its aggressive whisper in the water,
its manufactured buoyancy—
they startle
and shoot away like stars.
This poem first appeared in SWWIM Every Day.
—
Susan Cohen is the author of Throat Singing (2012), A Different Wakeful Animal (2016), and Democracy of Fire (2022). She’s won the Terrain.org Annual Poetry Prize, Red Wheelbarrow Prize, and a Pushcart Prize Anthology Special Mention, among other honors. A former journalist and contributing writer for the Washington Post Magazine, she also received awards for best magazine article and best book from the National Association of Science Writers. She lives in Berkeley.
