The Sea Inside My Heart

I took my heart down to the sea
When evening cooled the sand;
The water slipped around my feet
And reached toward my hand.

The tide brought in a broken shell,
Still pink beneath its scars;
I held it while the daylight thinned
And boats put out their stars.

I thought of all the things we said
Beside this restless blue,
How easily I spoke of years
As though their shape I knew.

Your footprints vanished long ago;
The shore has changed since then.
Yet sometimes, turning at a sound,
I look for you again.

That night the wind rose from the east
And shook the harbor light;
My heart, so careful through the day,
Beat hard against the night.

I almost called into the dark,
As if you stood offshore,
But water filled the space between
My silence and its roar.

I stayed until the rain had passed,
My sleeves against my skin,
And watched the little fishing boats
Come slowly, safely in.

One sailor knelt to tie a rope;
Another hauled a crate.
I felt the hunger in my bones
And saw that it was late.

How strange that grief should leave us room
For bread, for warmth, for sleep;
That even after love is gone,
The body asks to keep.

At dawn I walked along the pier
And breathed the sharpened air.
The sea was neither kind nor cruel;
It simply met me there.

I laid the shell upon a stone
Within the rising tide,
And let the water take the thing
My hand had kept inside.

Then, with the salt upon my lips,
I turned toward the town;
My heart still moved as oceans move—
No longer pulled me down.