When I tell you I would rather you describe a clock than time to me,
that the essence of your ocean sentiments is not the ocean,
I'm wondering if you would live if your feet got tangled in seaweed.
Write me the superstructure of water.

And now you drop your face.  I see my mistake.  You did not write
to contend.  So it was the ocean in four dry lines
like seaweed from Japanese groceries that thickens and plumps
when ladled in water.  Look, you don't even like it

when I give you some copies of ocean poems.  You detest the sea
and its marketable herring, its common tuna, and starfish
always losing their legs.  Think of the man

who fell from his fishing boat in the fog off Alaska.  He heard the motor
slowly trupping away, its cargo of vain fish under its wing.  Think of
his widow who detests the sea, who lives beside it, who writes now to her friend.

--Sandra McPhearson