Wanting a Child by Jorie Graham

Wanting a Child

 

How hard it is for the river here to re-enter

the sea, though it’s most beautiful, of course, in the waste

of time where it’s almost

turned back. Then

it’s yoked,

trussed . . . . The river

has been everywhere, imagine, dividing, discerning, 

cutting deep into the parent rock,

scouring and scouring

its own bed.

Nothing is whole

where it has been. Nothing

remains unsaid.

Sometimes I’ll come this far from home

merely to dip my fingers in this glittering , archaic

sea that renders everything

identical, flesh

where mind and body

blur. The seagulls squeak, ill-fitting

hinges, the beach is thick

with shells. The tide

is always pulsing upward, inland, into the river’s rapid

argument, pushing

with its insistent tragic waves — the living echo,

says my book, of some great storm far out at sea, too far

to be recalled by us

but transferred 

whole onto this shore by waves, so that erosion

is its very face.