Once in a year
it happens:
we awake
from shoals of city-slumber,
our skins thrumming,
eyes watery with salt
and desire.
And we return
to this sea,
eager to fill
our gaping senses
with its articles of faith:
kelp, starfish,
bit of coral
or shell,
surf smashing
against rock,
sting of salt spray-
spirit-images
we simply must have
in our poetry,
in our life.
But this time
we stare at the sea
and it stares back:
empty.
We lose our balance,
bump into each other.
What happened?
we ask, we drunk
on something
that is not the breeze.
I look at the lucencies
of gently waving blue,
and remember
a lover's question
pitched like a net
into noiseless deeps
of my feeling:
Why love the sea
when it is just there-
when it has no soul?
And my answer then
answers me now:
I love the sea
because it mirrors
my own soul.
See: Within a wave's
single cresting,
blue
shifts into gray
in the eye,
which is the seeing sky
water has no choice
but to resemble.
We ask the sea
a question,
and the truth
laps churning
at our feet:
You have changed,
haven't you-
so why
expect me
to stay the same?


-- J. Neil C. Garcia, Dumaguete: the Return