The tide came in, the way all necessary things come —
slowly, then completely, and the line
between where she ends, and where the water begins
is a question the sea has answered
without consulting her.
She remains. That is her life’s work
To remain at the margin, as the margin, dissolves.
There are two seas, inside every person, who has ever sat
at the edge of water and felt the pull.
The first is the Caspian —
an ancient, landlocked basin, the sea that has no exit,
that turns in on itself for centuries,
its waters brackish with everything it could not release,
the gray mist sitting on its surface
like unfinished thoughts, the northern reaches
heavy with memory, of ten thousand years
of circular becoming.
This is the sea of the interior —
the reservoir of ancestral fear, of self that circles
its own hidden floorboards, of the grief, and cannot find
an ocean to empty into, and so deepens
and deepens, and deepens
within its own walls.
Every family has a Caspian.
Every life has a Caspian — the feeling of being
separated and enclosed, of carrying waters
that have nowhere, finally, to go.
The second sea is the Arabian —
and the Arabian drives.
The monsoon swell comes from somewhere
beyond the reach of the atlas,
the trade winds, pushing warm and suffocating
towards horizons that are provocations —
a vast cerulean dark, that does not care
about individual ships, the individual woman,
the individual life that has come to its edge
with questions.
Homer's sea was never a landscape.
but a condition —
the water between, where you are, and where you are trying
to reach,
and trying is the whole story,
and the story never ends cleanly,
and the home you are sailing towards
keeps shifting its coordinates
because the home, is never a place
but a state of being
you briefly touched once, and have been
trying to relocate ever since.
We are all this navigation —
the Caspian and the Arabian
running through us, simultaneously,
the need for the enclosed and the need for the vast,
the terror of the interior, and the terror of the infinite,
the self that circles, and the self that drives
towards the horizon
that keeps receding, into more horizon.
The brine is everywhere now —
on her hands, on her lips, in the back of her throat
where fear lives and has been
slowly replaced by something
that has no name yet
but feels like the beginning of one.
The Caspian in her —
all that depth, all those enclosed waters,
the grief that had nowhere
to empty —
is emptying.
Slowly, the way the landlocked sea
would empty if someone
finally opened a passage to the ocean.
The Arabian is waiting.
patient, enormous, indifferent, ready to receive
whatever the interior finally releases.
The sea was always everything.
She just needed, to sit still
long enough, at its edge, to remember,
she was
made of it
to begin with.
