Flow

I need only watch the sway of tides,
wet undulation under the stroke of constant sky,
to know the passions of my own water’s cycles.

The river sends her ordered movements into all tributaries,
hip of marsh, inlet’s rippling fingers. They all snap and wave
at her timeless rhythm. Listen…you can hear her shift

as the moon cycles round to partner the next dance.
The sailboats pirouette to stare into her lush body, mesmerized.
They entrain to her mirrored waltz, a somatic chorus.

It’s not the rise and fall of my ocean goddess that stumps
my mind. I know and expect such changes, but timing’s my flaw.
And I’ve yet to swallow the extremes of storms and full moon swells.

Some days, the mud is exposed, north wind
rolling back the water’s edge until only rock
and clay are my neighbors. I am bereft when she withdraws.

Some nights, the southwest gales trash her shore and sling
twisted driftwood, dross and floods far beyond
any normalcy or my expectations of her power.

All these extremes in my small cove, so much at times
and then so lacking, slowly becoming the smoothing of  my
shoreline, cracking riprap into sand for beaches to be.

— VH McKinnie

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