The Blur

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The Blur

Just after you kissed her on the crimson beach
and bared your heart with that wine intensity
of self-abandonment long dreaded, she puked 
in the sand, petechia retches nixing your hand
from holding her hair or stroking her shoulder.

“It’s not about you,” she insisted despite you
not asking. But even if “just from the saltwater” 
swallowed in the rip current, what would stop
her blurring that gut panic with you, leaving you
ultimately due to such blurring? Do not forget,

boy, our bestial nature. Things, however solid,
change thereby for reasons irrelevant, trivial.
Not everyone is as “high-octane” in thought,
as logic-reigned, as university you. To prepare
yourself for the diversity of “the real world,”

remember that. But also remember that you 
are finite in knowledge. And so what seems
trivial and irrelevant to you, may—just may—
turn out more substantial, more relevant, 
than even your brain could have gathered.

Never the best swimmer, waves are not for her.
What would her life have been with you, then?
You love the sea, crave its borderless scene—
the freckles and the bleaching from the sun. 
There the sense of being a monad gives way.

*This poem first appeared in The Opiate (2018)

Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/roebot/