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
