Prayernessbeing

A poem on the illusion of separation.

I live inland but I draw in the ocean like a breath.
Inhalation: wave rise and crest, barrel over—break
ions in the dissolution threshold where water
meets land, this borderland you call home.

From the other side of the coastal range,
I tug on the ocean like a blanket.
I fill my lungs with life, for ocean is never
mere water, is Earth’s amniotic holding
of all life—how the whale carcass drifts
to the sea floor miles below and feeds
blind creatures it’s never met. How tissues
come apart in reverse evolution, reverse
embryonic order. How cells disintegrate into
waters where all building blocks exist. How
even landlocked we honor this eventually as
all water seeks lowest, seeks origin point,
washes us all clean and rivers us home.

I take this breath. I taste you salt, I taste you
coral and kelp. Jellyfish seal anemone mussel
sturgeon and eel and rust. Bioluminescent ones.
I taste you salmon, starfish, seagull. And if
I close my eyes, I can hear the pulse of every
beating heart in every connected body of water.
When I reopen them, I see the waves
lap the shore where you stand, unwinding
double helixes and depositing organelles, amino acids,
the faintest hint of humpback milk. Tuning in—
your breath here in sync with the beating heart
of the sea. I watch it all transmute at your feet,
becoming the air you breathe, being carried through
your permeable membrane into the wind.

My inhale, pulling across the old growth. I taste you
redwood, fir, madrone, elderberry, dogwood.
Pulling up into the rise and crest, this slower wave of land,
down the dry side of oak, ponderosa, buckbrush.
Taste mineral—quartz, feldspar, pumice, serpentine.
A pause at the top. Open my eyes in the midst, this terroir.

The trees here framing the creek lean, anticipating
my exhale. A wish—for all beings to make love like this.