VENICE BEACH

My grandmother always said,

Never turn your back on the ocean. 

I learned that it was a seething monster 

riptides whisked you away to the great beyond. 

I learned to swim late, but water was a siren call. 

I had found my element. Small water dragon.

My grandmother, who taught me to count the waves,

tried to swim at Sutro Baths. It never took.

She never trusted the water. I was fearless. 

Even at ten, riptides whisking me out didn’t scare me. 

When I visited my mother one summer in Venice Beach, 

I spent every waking hour in the water. 

She had an apartment right on the boardwalk.

She slept all day, went out by night, 

leaving me in charge of my baby brother. 

But the mornings were mine alone.

There was never any food in the house 

so I ate cream of wheat until the box was empty. 

The taste of brown sugar and butter 

still takes me back to those days. 

Lately, I’ve returned to that sweet elixir. 

Call it a second childhood, it invokes 

those sandy southern California beaches, 

misted mornings, and the ocean, whispering, 

huge outsider waves urging me onward, out to sea, 

no strangely cheerful Pikachu offering a life-raft.

Just the raw power of the waves 

and the liminal horizon urging me onward.

2/1/24 Molly Fisk’s Poem a Day

13th WAVE

13th WAVE

I was a child at Venice Beach,
floating in the calm sea beyond the surf,
when out of nowhere, rogue waves rose up
like translucent jade knives, formed crests
against the throat of the deep summer sky.

Out of my depth, I swam to greet them.
That was the drill if an Outsider appeared—
Swim to meet the wave before it broke you.
Dive through the crest to avoid its force.
Swim and dive, swim and dive. Deflect the blow.

Rise and fall, rise and fall. Far from land,
I watched the blond shore grow ever distant.
The waves played me—like the father I never had—
tossing me up to the roof of the sky. In terror,
I waited for the right wave to bring me in.

But I grew numb, the sea sapped my strength,
I was too far from shore for lifeguards to see.
When would my crazy mother—sleeping it off—
stonedeaf to my brother's wails, realize I was gone?
I was a child alone in a vast sea. Breathe. Breathe.

Out of nowhere I heard my grandmother's voice:
"Always count the waves," she said. "Find the set."
9, 11, 12—I counted, but couldn't find the pattern.
Then, on the horizon of a wave, the fin of a dolfin.
A break in the set. He looked me in the eye. "Now!"

We caught the 13th wave toward the safety of shore.
I lay facedown in the sand, too tired to be amazed,
or say "Bye." Who'd believe a child's tale, anyway?
I said nothing about the waves and the sea that day.
It was my secret—a matter of survival, at best.


8/1/2009

Poem published in Memories of Southern California: Poetic Recollections, Four Feathers Press, Don Campbell, Editor, 2022

Medusa's Kitchen, 2012