Gift

I dont think I've ever posted this on my blog, but its something that I return to every so often whenever I need to feel calm, hope, hopelessness, peace and turmoil all at the same time. I can't explain it, but this poem almost always comforts me.

The author is J. Neil Garcia, a filipino poet/writer and this is taken from his book "Sorrows of Water".


The rhythm that hears me
this day is the sea's:
salt-borne, choking with weed
and oysters, the movement
of piscean shapes weaving water
far as the eye can see.
And I am back
amid the repeating waves off Pamilacan:
the vessel bearing me
is little else but desire,
a density much heavier
than our earth's liquid nature-
its only choice is to float.
It is not stillness I am seeking from this ocean,
but its pain:
a violence of forms
in this sweep of appearances--
flashes of fish flying,
herons and somersaulting terns,
the handsome heads of cetaceans rising
from abyssmal depths, even
the glint of shark-fins,
slicing the horizon like quick
knives. Life caught
in the maw
of its own consumption:
permeable, as though we all
are designed to pass through
each other like food--
plankfon sifting
into the fine-tooth-comb
of baleen, sunlight
rippling past riptides
to reach the sightless bottom
of rock.
And you are everywhere
evern as you are nowhere
in touch, for here is the place
things cherished are laid bare in--
the edge of body's knowing,
the edge of the world.
And I know my task
for the day
is no different from the tide's:
to take in and let go,
to push against land and
pull away, to love you without claims.
for nothing given is ever owned, and ghosts
we already are
of fickle matter's imaginings.
I told you I am yours for the kill--
I can never take it back.
Let this gift pass through
the self's fictive openings,
allow it brief residence someplace
in the soul.
True: not even the sea can hold us.
But listen:
its real bequest is not loss,
it is transformation--
glass fished out
from among a shore's brittle ruins
is never quite glass
but a muted shard of water:
all the ocean pressed against the palm.
An empty shell, a grainy piece of coral.
The gift is yours
to keep or not to.
I can no more reclaim it
than the sea disown its salt--
for, love, how do you
unbreathe
a breath?