Words for the reader who remembers the water

I am astonished
to learn we are
rowing
where it is clear.

We have landed.
In script, poetry
authored by the current,
the marbled fusion of is and was,
reclaiming the memory of water:
cold, cruel on both sides.

In order to make love
a figure of speech,
we use pamphlets, letters,
postcards that begin
Dear… how I miss… remember…

Words, the ones you used
to revise me.

In this boat
there is no must be content.
No forced, no caught in it;
it is impossible to see your face
or my face on the glassy surface—nothing

but the water, mid-history,
rolling toward us;
this calm, inflated rowing
to a foreign port.

©1999 Tamar Love