I love you like I want to lick your shoreline,
but what good has trying to describe the ocean
ever done anyone? Here is the trouble
with trying to talk about an object: most things
aren’t really about themselves at all,
they’re about the things you’re thinking about
on the day when you happen to look at them
a little too hard, no amount

of bone-white, salt-bleached wood,
twisting to indicate that it used
to be the roots beneath the tree;
used to twine through the dark
and the damp seeking water
and the richness that comes
from heavy pockets of decay

will touch the worry of the water-line—
rising, always, swallowing ground
once inhabited, an ocean, these days,
makes refugees, it warms, it creeps,
and I love it like I want to fall
out of an airplane about it, want to cry
with tenderness for those depths unmapped
but already shifting, pushed by human hands,
love it like I want to trip down the stairs
about it, stub my toe and chip my tooth
about it, love it like a teenager who thinks
the world they know is the world which will exist
as they grow, thinks that they know
the world even as it unmakes itself, I love
those waves like I love the ache of it,
which is lucky since the ache might be
the only thing left.