By the sea...

After you’ve swum in the ocean, felt
the current, wave-crash, and depth
that goes deeper, deeper, and darker,
to choose a lake, with its smooth
and silt, no matter how fresh the water,
how relieved the skin to be rid of
the salt’s sting, is to ignore the hunger
of the man brave enough to love the sea.

Marie-Elizabeth Mali
 
http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a97/foxkitsune/gulpofthesea_zps68f6f6b0.jpg

You are eating the sea, that’s it, only the sensation of a gulp of sea water has been wafted out of it by some sorcery, and you are on the verge of remembering you don’t know what, mermaids or the sudden smell of kelp on the ebb tide or a poem you read once, something connected with the flavor of life itself.

Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer

oh my god, that picture!
 


I know Og has already posted Masefield's "Sea Fever" but I like it so much that I'm throwing it up here once more.




"I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking."
-John Masefield
Sea Fever

http://ih.constantcontact.com/fs066/1101271253888/img/213.jpg



 
http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a97/foxkitsune/yourrustedcompass_zps902e97dd.jpg
They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?

Kate Braverman
 
Your hair contains an entire dream full of sails and masts.

When I gnaw on your rebellious sea hair, it is as if I am eating memories, happiness espoused to water.

At the start of your tawny tentacles, follicles give way to the soft matter of your brain. Your hair is the arm of your brain.

I saw two foxes on my way through your hair yesterday. Something was in the air; the animals were stir-crazy. Hundreds of geese were circling the pond.

Jefferson Navicky
 
When the moon was full they came to the water.
some with pitchforks, some with rakes,
some with sieves and ladles,
and one with a silver cup.

And they fished til a traveler passed them and said,
“Fools,
to catch the moon you must let your women
spread their hair on the water —
even the wily moon will leap to that bobbing
net of shimmering threads,
gasp and flop till its silver scales
lie black and still at your feet.”

And they fished with the hair of their women
till a traveler passed them and said,
“Fools,
do you think the moon is caught lightly,
with glitter and silk threads?
You must cut out your hearts and bait your hooks
with those dark animals;
what matter you lose your hearts to reel in your dream?”

And they fished with their tight, hot hearts
till a traveler passed them and said,
“Fools,
what good is the moon to a heartless man?
Put back your hearts and get on your knees
and drink as you never have,
until your throats are coated with silver
and your voices ring like bells.”

And they fished with their lips and tongues
until the water was gone
and the moon had slipped away
in the soft, bottomless mud.

Lisel Mueller
 
fata, i wish you'd post more over on the poetry forum :rose:

you find the best and most beautiful things to read
 
Thread worthy of a sticky
Octopus sucker
Pulls me under crying, Kelp!
 
...All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea …


Dylan Thomas, from "A Child’s Christmas in Wales"
One of my favs.

Could I suggest two more novels? Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, the Sea!" and John Banville's "The Sea". Entirely different. Both Booker winners, I believe.
 
“My soul is full of longing
for the secret of the sea,
and the heart of the great ocean
sends a thrilling pulse through me.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 
Gypsy of the sea
In winter wambling over scurvy whaleroads,
Jooking in the wake of ships
A sailor hooks you
And carves his girl's name on your beak
Guest of the storm
Who weeps you off to party after party,
You flit in a sooty grey coat
Smelling of must
Barefoot across a sea of broken glass

Stormpetrel, Richard Murphy
 
About human love,
she knew nothing.

I'll show you he promised.
But first you need legs.

And he held up
a knife

with the sharpest of tips
to the ripeness of her emerald tail.

She danced an involuntary dance,
captive
twitching with fear.

Swiftly
he slit

down the muscular length
exposing the bone in its red canal.

She played dead on the rock

dead by the blue lagoon
dead to the ends of her divided tail.

He fell on her, sunk himself deep
into the apex.

Then he fled
on his human legs.

Human love cried the sea,
the sea in her head.

Moniza Alvi
 
One of my all time faves.

Call me sailor before poet.
In sweet dark coves I shipwrecked,
crashed with a passion into her salt
and smooth sand body.


It was something in her hips, in the brown
motion and the swaying. Something
that drew me to the hollows of her,
my laughing wild girl.


Her singing calls me now from sleep.
Draws me back to the rocks, and the wet tongues
licking my footprints away. Kneeling in the ephemeral
shape of the shoreline, my eyes are filled with wind-whipped tears,
my mouth with the memory of dark hair tangled
between her siren lips and mine.


Corey Ellen Nadel
 
http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a97/foxkitsune/sw_zps3ae9c9d8.jpg
Cant you see where memories are kept bright?
Tripping on the water like a laughing girl.
Time in her eyes is spawning past life,
One with the ocean and the woman unfurled,
Holding all the love that waits for you here.
Catch us now for I am your future.
A kiss on the wind and we'll make the land.
Come over here to where when lingers,
Waiting in this empty world,
Waiting for then, when the lifespray cools.
For now does ride in on the curl of the wave,
And you will dance with me in the sunlit pools.
We are of the going water and the gone.
We are of water in the holy land of water
And all that's to come runs in
With the thrust on the strand.

John Carder Bush
 
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