Coming Ashore
Dec 22 2014


When you're 90% water
you eventually come ashore,

safe harbour

in a tumultuous sea

that should have felt like home.

Even though bones float,
blood-thick marrow
mother-of-pearl joints.

And the gut, awash with bugs,
air-loving
and anaerobes.
Marine creatures
in your benthic depths
unacquainted with light.

While the heart pumps,
a beat-per-second
every day of your life.
What the heart-sick always does
soggy with sentiment.
And the lungs suck,
silkily wet
multi-chambered as sponge.

But it's the brain, greedy for blood,
with its glossy sheen
and rich white veins of fat
that always comes up for air,
pops to the surface like a ball of down
no matter how hard
you hold it under.
The hydrophobic soul
your very nature abhors,
all that remains
when the body fails.

You began
breathing in amnion.
As rudimentary
as primordial fish,
impervious
as perfect skin.

Now mottled and thin
you've gone bloated, and pale

and putrified
and will soon be parchment dry,
buried at sea
or shovelled beneath
the warm wet earth.


I saw the cover of Catherine Gildiner's new memoir, Coming Ashore (which was preceded by Too Close to the Falls and After the Falls). The title not only conveys a sense of finality, but seems to say it with a sense of "relief": as if snatched from the clutch of the murderous sea (or, in her case, churning cataract), as if coming to rest on solid land, as if returning home. But why do we find solace on dry land when we're mostly water, and when we begin life as a fetus in a primordial sea? Isn't the ocean home?

So I began this poem as a stream-of-consciouness riff on the ambiguity of our nature: that we are 90% water, yet unalterably terrestrial creatures; that we seem solid, but are actually mostly liquid; that our essence is water, but our consciousness is contained in the fatty brain, arguably the body's most hydrophobic organ. And that eventually, we return to the elements of which we're made.

I had fun finding underwater references, like marine creatures and geographic features. And fun with contrasting sensations of dry and wet. This poem is a lot less linear than my usual effort; which is a refreshing change. But doesn't make much of a difference to me, anyway, since my pleasure is mostly in the sentence, and the power of the sentence doesn't change.

I'm not sure why the ending turned to death (except for the fact that all my poems would turn to death, if I wasn't careful!) Part of it was this idea of the inevitable return to our constituent elements, as in ashes to ashes and dust to dust. And part of it was that lately there has been a lot to do with death. Especially ideas of terminal suffering and euthanasia and assisted suicide: which probably explains the image of someone bloated with heart failure, and of a brain contemplating its dying body.